Zapp Brannigan

Captain of the Democratic Order of Planets' starship Nimbus, Zapp Brannigan is a preening, incompetent military hero who has bumbled his way into command through sheer confidence and luck. He struts, he poses, he mangles logic into grandiose speeches, and he pursues Leela with a smarm he mistakes for charm.

Zapp works because he's built entirely from military-hero clichés with the competence surgically removed, and Billy West plays him with such oily, self-satisfied bluster that every strategic disaster sounds like a triumph. The gap between his swagger and his stupidity is the joke, delivered every time with total, magnificent sincerity.