Here’s the Proof That ‘Futurama’ Had the ‘Most Overeducated Cartoon Writers in History’
As if anyone needed more proof that Matt Groening loved Harvard alumni in his writers’ room, by the time he started working on Futurama in 1999, he went out and got a half-century’s worth of Harvard education to help him come up with such cerebral jokes as “I.C. Weiner.”
It’s no secret that Groening’s sci-fi comedy series is a crowd pleaser among academically-minded animation fans. Futurama is famously laden with in-jokes that only those viewers who are at least slightly interested in science and mathematics can properly appreciate, and, in one particularly proof-heavy 2010 episode, “The Prisoners of Benda,” Futurama writer and PhD mathematician Ken Keeler penned and proved “Keeler’s Theorem” to solve the body-swap problem posed by the Globetrotter-heavy plot.
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Futurama’s emphasis on empirical evidence and its merging of slapstick with the scientific method comes from the intellectual interests of its writers, who, when the show began, shared three PhDs, seven masters degrees and a full 50 years at Harvard between the entire staff. Back in 2014 and barely a year after the show’s most recent series finale “Meanwhile,” OG Futurama writer and Harvard-educated lawyer Matthew Verrone penned a reflection on the writing staff’s sometimes haunting ability to both see and create the future for Slate, musing, “We were easily the most overeducated cartoon writers in history, earning critical acclaim, multiple Emmy awards and a worldwide nerd fan base, but we weren’t smart enough to figure out how to avoid cancellation (three times).”
“The show was, at its core, a parody of sci-fi conventions (mostly the literary ones but, sometimes, the ones that take place in big halls with fat guys in Klingon armor),” Verrone explained of Futurama’s original premise. “Yet we tried very hard to be scientifically and mathematically accurate at all times. It was one of the preoccupations of David X. (Cohen) and the other science-minded writers.”
“Fortunately, accuracy was easy for the math scholars among us,” Verrone continued of his esteemed colleagues who put their collective genius together just to write a show about a protagonist who calls an idea “a headache with pictures.” Verrone said of the Futurama writers, “Two had published papers that earned them Erdös numbers of 3 and 4, something about which only math scholars would care. This gave the rest of us time to check our eBay auctions, play video games, and experiment with 3-D printing.”
It’s unclear how many of those original brainiacs remain on the Futurama writing staff in its umpteenth revival on Hulu some 25 years after Groening and Cohen first put together a TV writers’ room equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters (the Futurama ones), though some of those towering intellects like Keeler remain attached to the series in executive producer roles. Nevertheless, the culture of scientific curiosity on Futurama thankfully continues to this day.
Honestly, if Futurama ever stopped making math jokes, I wouldn’t want to live on this planet anymore.
