The phrase was often present in stories which carried a theme of the superiority of human emotion over limitations within the logic utilized by machines.
This occurs in several episodes of the original series of Star Trek (e.g. "I, Mudd", "Requiem for Methuselah", "The Return of the Archons" and "The Changeling"), as well as in the finale to Logan's Run.
In the episode of the 1968 television series The Prisoner entitled "The General", Patrick McGoohan causes a supercomputer to explode by feeding it the question "Why?".
"[2] In a Futurama episode, Leela's attempt to thwart Robot Santa with a paradox was stopped by his "paradox-absorbing crumple zones".
In "A Fishful of Dollars", Fry asks for anchovies (extinct in the Futurama universe) which eventually makes a chef-robot repeat, "Does not compute," before exploding.
In the Red Dwarf episode, "The Last Day", the android Hudzen is told by Kryten that silicon heaven does not exist.
In one episode, Homer said he wanted to make a robot repeat the words "It does not compute" until it exploded by giving it illogical commands.
In the episode "Trilogy of Error", Lisa's school project, a grammar-fixing robot, explodes after hearing too much bad grammar from the mobsters led by Fat Tony.
In "Treehouse of Horror XIX", there is the following dialogue: In The IT crowd episode "The Dinner Party", the phrase is said by Jessica, one of Jen's friends, to Moss.
The phrase is also the title of a song sung by the robotic vocalist ALT in the arcade game Pop'n Music 20 Fantasia.