But while “Futurama” never gets too high art to confuse the regular people in the audience, it’s always been pretty good at tipping its hat to the physicists watching at home, letting them know that the show is also aware of how nonsensical most of this is. As Cohen explained:
“Whenever we violated the laws of physics — for example, when the ship goes faster than the speed of light — we always tried to indicate to viewers that, even though we’re violating science, we understand what it is we’re violating. For example, we did an episode where we explained that, no, they’re not going faster than the speed of light; science had readjusted the speed of light in the year 2999, or whenever.”
It’s a ridiculous explanation, but of course, it’s no more ridiculous than a robot main character who is inexplicably more emotional and self-centered than any regular human. It’s the sort of thing that’s funny to casual viewers, while pre-emptively addressing the complaints of any nitpicky members of the audience. “We always try to tip the fans off that we’re not violating science out of ignorance,” Cohen said. And for the most part, viewers over the past few decades have been more than happy to accept the occasional scientific inaccuracy in their sci-fi comedy cartoon.