Character
The Grand Midwife
The Grand Midwife in Futurama (1999), played by Tress MacNeille.
A robot obstetrics fixture in Futurama's universe, she presides over robot deliveries with brisk professional cheer, cataloguing the newborn's future in a single breathless prophecy before it's even finished. She treats birth as data entry, rattling off a whole life story between one contraction and the next.
The joke is structural: she compresses an entire character's fate into one rapid-fire monologue, and Tress MacNeille delivers it with the flat, chipper efficiency of someone reading a shipping manifest. It's a tiny bit, but the deadpan absurdity of narrating a robot's whole life as it's being assembled never stops being funny.
Played by
Appears in
Futurama1999