Comedy is a funny thing.
Just as no philosopher has ever been able to reach a definition of “art” that wasn’t immediately challenged and exposed as insufficient by another philosopher five seconds later, no universally successful attempt has yet been made to take stock of what makes humans laugh, how that can be achieved through media, and what the rules for said media might be.
We’re still, by all accounts, making sense of the social phenomenon of laughter.
And yet, no one needs to have read Terry Eagleton’s “Humor” to understand when something is funny and react accordingly.
There’s something just ineffably, atavistically immediate about good comedy — something that could still be enduring 1,000 years into the future.Such is the appeal of most futuristic sci-fi comedy, but especially so of “Futurama,” arguably its greatest 21st-century exponent.
The Matt Groening-created animated sitcom managed to get seven great seasons…
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