Futurama: Most Memorable Turanga Leela Quotes

Out of all these, it was Turanga Leela who stood as the one sane person among the chaos. Her status as the straight man of the group garnered her many moments where she came across as the most mature one, and we have 10 of her most memorable quotes to prove this.

10 “This is it. The moment we should have trained for.”

While the other characters like to beat around the bush and quip some funny lines, Leela instead makes her lines funny by pointing out the obvious in the situation. In this scene, she and Zapp were about to take a huge plummet, which is when Leela made sure to mention they weren’t prepared for the moment at all.

This is the best kind of delivery one can have when playing the straight man, as Leela managed to cut the tension perfectly in a scene where we were expecting something wild to happen. By being Captain Obvious here, Leela set the audience up with a laugh as the next scene commenced.

9 “Fry, acting like a moron won’t solve anything.”

Leela’s constant put downs of Fry were made funnier because they never deterred the latter from continuing to be an idiot. While the untrained Futurama viewer might think Leela acts high and mighty by being condescending to Fry, it actually is a result of Fry being so stupid on constant occasions.

In this scene, Fry once again had a silly suggestion to make, to which Leela replied that being an idiot would be the least helpful thing to do. In response, Fry answered that all hope was lost because that was his final recourse. You see what Leela has to put up with?

8 “Society is never gonna make any progress until we all learn to pretend to like each other.”

If you’re being honest to yourself, you don’t actually like the majority of people you interact with on a general basis. Most of us aren’t too fond with people at work, and only tolerate them because we’re getting paid from these places. 

Knowing this is how society functions, Leela pointed this out very well, only by saying it out loud she made it sound pretty funny. Still, there was a lot of truth that was conveyed through the use of humor, as hearing this quote makes you think in rather philosophical terms and how being part of society means being fake to a degree.

7 “They’re not evil, but don’t be confused. They are jerks.”

If you haven’t seen this episode then you’re no doubt confused why there are two Leelas in the picture. As it happened, there was an alternate dimension scenario going on here, and there were then two of every character on the show.

The others started believing their alternate selves were evil beings, resulting in a bad situation arising. Leela figured out there was no real hostility, however, and communicated to the others of this. She continued keeping it real, though, and made sure to mention that the duplicate people were still jerks, even if they weren’t bad guys.

6 “For a split second, my common sense was overwhelmed by pity.”

Quite a few times Leela would give into Captain Zapp’s advances, despite Leela insisting she was too sophisticated to fall for Zapp’s Captain Kirk-like charms. Even when Leela would inevitably hop on with Zapp, she would then follow up afterward by defending her decision.

Here, Leela reasoned she only felt pity for Zapp, after she had fallen prey to his weird seduction antics. For some reason, though, we do understand her here, because some people do come across as more attractive when we feel enormous pity for them. Then again, it’s hard to side with Leela when it’s a guy like Zapp she got involved with.

5 “Fry, that’s the only thing about being a slave.”

It’s not just Fry who gets to benefit off of Leela’s set up for jokes, as Leela herself gets her time in the spotlight when responding to Fry and getting the audience to laugh. Within the scene, the main characters were held captive, leading Fry to go on a rant.

He would tell the others what he thought were the worst parts of being a slave, and proceeded to list down everything we already had figured. Leela would say what we were thinking out loud, commenting exasperatedly that all Fry had just listed were the only things that slaves did.

4 “I don’t get it, Fry. Who was Ted Danson, and why did you bid $10,000 for his skeleton?”

When the show first came out, Cheers had ended not all that long ago and Frasier was still very much running. Around this time, Ted Danson was still alive in the minds of viewers, leading to the 1999-based Fry to bid for Danson’s skeleton in the future.

To put things into context for you kids of this generation, that would be like you having the opportunity to get the skeleton of Robert Downey Jr, during a time period where stuff like cloning was common practice. Making this really funny, though, was how clueless Leela was about Ted Danson; like we mentioned before, it would be like someone asking who Robert Downey Jr is today.

3 “I usually try to keep my sadness pent up inside where it can fester quietly as a mental illness.”

It’s too bad this line was just setting up for a joke on Fry’s part, because we think it was powerful on its own. In this scene, Leela admitted to Fry that she didn’t get to fully share her sadness and would keep it buried inside. The flip side was that her sadness would turn into a mental health problem.

Being a sitcom, the next quote by Fry had the moment turn into a joke, but we’d like to linger on Leela’s words. There are many people in the world who feel the same as she did, and it was nice to hear it even though we couldn’t help her out.

2 “Well, we lost to all our opponents. Even that team that turned out to be us in the mirror.”

Shows like The Simpsons and Futurama derive quite a bit of their comedy from awkward humor, and they are perfect in creating them. For instance, this moment saw the main characters having badly lost in a competition, with Leela commenting at the severity of their defeat.

As it turned out, they were so hilariously bad that they not only lost to every single one of their opponents, but somehow lost to their own reflections in the mirror. Making this funnier was the slight beat that was present to make this joke set in, and it wouldn’t have had the desired effect had Leela not been the one to say it.

1 “Well, it wasn’t a bad life, if only I could get back that time I spent watching Tron: Legacy.”

Back in 2012, the whole world was waiting for the supposed end of days scenario to happen in December, leading to several TV shows poking fun at this event. Futurama made their own version by having the supposed end take place in 3012 instead, which was where Leela spoke of her greatest regret.

According to her, she had lived her life the best way she could, but the only thing she would have dearly liked to have changed was watching 2010’s Tron: Legacy. At the time, the film was still fresh in our minds, and most people weren’t happy with what they’d gotten. It seems Leela just told us people from a thousand years in the future still won’t be fond of this movie.

About The Author

Saim Cheeda
(1347 Articles Published)

Saim Cheeda is an entertainment writer covering all of Film, TV, Gaming and Books. He’s been a writer for Valnet since 2017, contributing 500+ articles for The Gamer, The Things, Game Rant, Comic Book Resources and Screen Rant. Apart from freelance writing, Saim is a lifestyle blogger, co-owning the blog 3 States Apart.

http://3statesapart.com

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