Tinny Tim

Tinny Tim is a small, rusted robot beggar who haunts the streets of New New York, propped on a broken leg and pleading for spare change in a thin, pitiful voice. He is Futurama's Dickensian parody made literal — a sweet, sorrowful little machine nobody can quite bring themselves to ignore.

The joke is entirely in the collision: a robot doing Tiny Tim's threadbare Victorian pathos, dropped into a candy-colored sci-fi sitcom that usually has no patience for sentiment. Tress MacNeille gives him a cracked, wheedling delivery that's funny precisely because it's played completely straight, and the show never lets the gag overstay its welcome.