Medical Humor Comics

Medical Humor Comics

Medical Humor Comics

Imagine a world where your career is entirely out of your control, and determined by a chip implanted in your hand; where there is a booth on every street corner in which you can pay to commit suicide; where Richard Nixon is President of the World; where, if you don’t pay your taxes, you are sentenced to spend a weekend with the Pain Monster; where you are compulsorily incarcerated at the age of 160; where Hell actually exists; where Mom’s Mega Corp and the bloated Central Bureaucracy rule the roost; where Christmas has become a day of Global Terror; and where aliens that look vaguely like evolved dinosaurs are constantly on the verge of invading and wiping out the human race.

This is the world of Matt Groening’s Futurama.

Dystopia and Comedy

It could be a classic setting for a dystopian novel: a young man is frozen accidentally, and wakes up a thousands years in the future, finding himself beset by the above list of horrors.

Many of the features of the series are analogous with written dystopias: the career chips and compulsory disposal of the old are comparable with the caste system and the mandatory euthanasia of Brave New World; the suicide booths with the ‘assisted suicide’ clinics in Soylent Green (a film referred to frequently in the series); and the urban sprawl, Robot Hell, and corporate rule elements are evocative of The Space Merchants.

So why does Futurama fail to instill any fear? Further, why, in fact, does Fry prefer this nightmarish scenario to his old life in the 21st century?

Well, any dystopia is fundamentally satirical in its design. For example, the idea of institutionally supported suicide is analogous with the fact that suicide has become a major concern in modern Western Anglo-Saxon societies (see this post on the Floating Sheep blog for an interest sample of data, indicating how often Death is entered as a search term on the Internet in relation to global region).

Also, the satire of compulsory euthanasia is a result of the fact that modern economies are facing a huge struggle coping with aging populations, and that the media has created a beauty-worshiping culture that inherently biases youth, and almost makes looking/being youthful a prerequisite for happiness.