Orson Welle's Head

Preserved in a jar at the Head Museum in New New York, this is one of the many disembodied heads of historical figures Futurama keeps floating in tanks as background scenery and occasional punchlines. Pompous, theatrical, and utterly literal about being reduced to a talking head, it appears fleetingly rather than anchoring any plot.

The joke is structural: a titan of cinema reduced to bubbling in a jar, deployed for one line and then forgotten, which is exactly the show's gag about immortality being undignified. Maurice LaMarche, famous for his uncanny Orson Welles impression, gets to detonate that voice in the smallest possible dose, which makes it funnier.