Satire-o-rama

Futurama has ranked as one of my all time favorite tv shows ever since I started watching it when I was in about sixth or seventh grade.  It is absolutely hilarious, and it owes much of its hilarity to satire.  The show is constantly poking fun at the way things are currently in the US often by portraying their long term effects in the future.  Here's an example: 

This minute long clip features Al Gore as a taxi driver, which I think can be classified as either hyperbole or situational irony.  It would be hyperbole because it is taking Gore's declining career and saying it's going to go as low as a taxi driver, which is probably not going to happen no matter how much relevance he loses.  It can also be argued that his presence is situational irony because when Bender gets in the cab, the audience expects some stereotypical cab driver but instead gets a famous politician.  The "Hybraxi" that Gore uses is a parody of Gore's interests in a way because he is an environmentalist, and his general incompetence behind the wheel is hyperbole that exaggerates his shortcomings as a politician and the general view of Gore to be a goofy guy.  Then there is the situational irony of the bridge, where the hybraxi goes up and then comes down the same way it came despite all of our previous experience with this tv/movie trope.  Finally, it ends on the 100 dollar gallon of gas line, which is hyperbole of rising gas prices.

That's quite a bit of satire for just one minute of footage, isn't it?  There's a point to it too!  The general statement of the clip is that we should listen to Al Gore (Well, maybe not specifically Al Gore, but people with Al Gore's ideas).  Despite the fact that he can be a tad buffoonish and shows severe maladroitness in the clip, we know that he was right about the environment and whatnot because a gallon of gas costs $100.  We shouldn't reduce his career to that of a taxi driver when he is correct about the direction of the planet.  Do you want to spend $100 dollars on gas?  The creators of Futurama don't, and neither do I thanks to their clever use of satire.