A Simple Line In Futurama Had The Writers At Their Wits' End
In the "Futurama" episode "War is the H-Word," Fry (Billy West) and Bender (John DiMaggio) discover that they can get a 5% discount on ham-flavored chewing gum if they have a military I.D. Feeling that they would never be drafted into any kind of foolish military conflict, the two sign up for the armed services and absquatulate with their gum.
And then the war came.
Fry and Bender are immediately drafted into a bizarre battlefield excursion they're told very little about. They are trained to fire guns and be generally boorish and sexist, as their commanding officer is the irrepressible misogynist Zapp Brannigan (West). Fry's and Bender's much more capable friend Leela (Katey Sagal) joins the army in disguise (she puts on a beard) just so she can make sure the two dopes don't get blown up on day one of combat. It won't be until they are shipped to the front that our main characters will see the enemy for the first time. It seems that they are fighting a sentient species of fleshy ball beings.
This, naturally, allowed the "Futurama" writers to go a little hogwild. "War is the H-Word" is replete with ball puns ranging from the childish to the downright blue. Just when you think no more ball jokes can be made, writer Eric Horsted cracks out another. Example: the disembodied head of Henry Kissinger (Maurice LaMarche), trying to negotiate peace with the Brain Balls — the balls' leaders — he pleas to put an end to the bloodshed. "We have seen too many body bags and ball sacks," he says.
But there was one scene where the ball jokes ran dry. Back in 2017, during a Reddit AMA, Groening revealed the single line of Kissinger's that gave them headaches for days.
What do you do with an elephant with three balls? Walk him, then pitch to the rhino.
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.