Hilarious Nihilism

As someone who actually doesn’t watch a lot of television, and who doesn’t have satellite, Hulu, Netflix, or any other streaming service, it’s weird for me to talk about the shows I like, much less write about them.

There are things I watch when I can, sure. I love dark things like Orphan Black and paranormal shows. Ancient Aliens is just entertaining as hell, even if it’s just to see how high Giorgio’s hair is today.

But those aren’t what I go to in those moments where I’m just done with everything. When I’m feeling the ridiculousness of the world and the way people think weighing on me, I turn to Futurama. There is nowhere else I have found that has the same glorious levels of irreverence without turning to toilet humor in every episode.

Some people feel that Futurama is bleak. That something set a thousand years in the future ought to be a little more upbeat, and that things should be better at that point.

First off, that’s boring and nobody would watch it.

Secondly, and more importantly in my opinion, is that Futurama shows us that humans are humans are humans. We may overcome certain short-sighted failings such as racism, but the likelihood is that we’re going to fall into speciesism, or planet-of-birth-ism. We may get a handle on recycling and not constantly throwing things away, but we have a fast food joint on every known planet.

In the show, humans have come together in ways they never have so far in the real world, but this meant coming under one governing body that has a “President of Earth.” Unsurprisingly, the individual who holds this role is highly questionable at best, and downright scum at worst - but yet the masses seem to overlook this, and when someone actually tries to remedy the problem, a glitch occurs in the Universe and their hard work is all for naught. Not to mention the idea that the people running everything else are basically insane in their own ways. Sounds familiar.

For me, and I feel like for a lot of other people as well, this is actually nice. To think about the fact that there is not some kind of utopia just over the horizon.

Why is this nice? Because it gives us hope that our current living population isn’t just a special kind of stupid.

Humans are fucking weird, if we’re honest. We’re petty, and we’re short-sighted, and we’re easily tempted. We do things that make us feel good without thinking of the long term effects, while we do things for the long term good that make us feel good about ourselves in order to balance out the things we do to feel good right now.

We care, but sometimes about really weird things. We have stunning moments of revelation that can change everything, and sometimes while we’re doing our best to be our best, we drop the ball in a big way.

But the important things about humans is that we TRY. We try to be good, and honorable, and do the right thing. We try to make things good and right even if we sometimes choose poor methods of getting there. But we’re resilient, and we keep getting back up and trying again.

That’s why the human race keeps going, and we hold that hope up for the future.

And Futurama encompasses all of that. It makes fun of our petty nature in new and creative ways. It points to our need to keep creating - just look at Bender and the other robots who act just like humans. It nods to our failures - just look at Bender and the other robots!

But it really just points out that humans are gonna human. We’re an inherently flawed species who is hurling through the cosmos on a large and pretty rock, and for the most part we have no idea what we’re supposed to be doing.

But we do the things anyway, and as long as humans exist, that is never going to change.

I find that both frustrating, hilarious, and comforting at the end of a long day dealing with other petty, imperfect humans.

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