Futurama: 10 Things It Did Better Than The Simpsons
8. More Intelligent Humor
The Simpsons has featured a bevy of intelligent writers, but the focus has always been on the laughs and contemporary issues. When it comes to Futurama, the focus was on more intelligent humor. While the series appealed to a wide audience, those with an education and better understanding of physics and mathematics had a few more laughs than the rest of us.
One running gag on the show involved the use of an alien language featuring hidden messages. This was cracked soon after the show aired, which prompted the writers to come up with a newer, harder substitution cipher/alien language to keep fans guessing.
That wasn't the only Easter Egg for the eggheads, there were many more spread throughout the series. Several of the writers held PhD's in applied mathematics resulting in the development of theorems and papers written for the show.
The Futurama Theorem (also called the Keeler Theorem) was created to achieve a plot-point, but went on to inspire further, legitimate mathematical research. There was even a joke featuring that theorem in the episode, The Prisoner Of Benda, where the Professor declared they would have to solve their problem using math... and they did exactly that.