Professor Geology

Professor Geology turns up as exactly what the name promises: an academic authority on rocks and strata, dropped into Futurama's future with the deadpan seriousness of a real scientist. He appears briefly to explain or complicate some plot point, speaking with the flat confidence of a man who has spent his life on sediment and expects everyone else to care as much.

The joke is entirely in the literalism — a show full of blob monsters and time paradoxes pausing to consult a geology professor as though that's the sensible expert to call. David Herman plays him with straight-faced academic dryness, never winking at the absurdity, which is exactly why the gag lands.