Some other zingers from the episode include a scene wherein Zapp Brannigan describes the Brain Balls as having a lot of Brains and having a lot of … chutzpah. In another scene, Bender complains that the balls are making him testy. When the Earth army wins a battle, a headline reads “BALLS THOROUGHLY LICKED.”
Bender, for byzantine reasons, is allowed to join Henry Kissinger’s head for the peace negotiations with the Brain Balls. Naturally, the crass, blustering Bender gets impatient with the diplomacy and threatens to shove the peace accord papers up their … Bender pauses. “Where do you shove things up a ball?” he wonders. Kissinger responds by saying “This isn’t a productive area of discussion.” Productive area. As in the reproductive area. It’s oblique, but it’s another testicle joke.
Groening says that joke took the “Futurama” team two days to write:
“We were stuck writing the scene in which the head of Henry Kissinger in a jar was negotiating with the Balls. It took two full days to come up with a single line for Kissinger — two full days of nonstop unusable testicle jokes. We were going crazy, exasperated and fatigued with the all the balls puns that we were unable to stop making. Finally, someone wearily muttered, ‘This is not a productive area of discussion,’ and voila! Timeless comedy genius, plus we got to go home.”
One can only imagine the hundreds of testicular jokes that Groening and his team invented. Doubtless, many of them wouldn’t be appropriate to print here. “Futurama” could frequently be ribald, and “War is the H-Word” allowed the writers to have a little fun.
You might say they had a ball.