Timmy's Mother

Timmy's Mother appears only in passing, the anxious center of a running sight gag: somewhere, always, her boy Timmy has fallen down a well again, and she is there to raise the alarm. She is pure function — worry, urgency, a call for help that repeats absurdly throughout New New York life.

She works because the joke never explains itself twice the same way; Tress MacNeille plays her with straight, sitcom-serious alarm every single time, which is exactly what makes the gag land. It is a tiny running bit elevated by total commitment rather than variation.