The billboards and general signage in the GTA games are the anti-comedy, they’re an anathema to humor. They might as well just be a looping video of Top 10 Funniest Family Guy Moments.
Now, my friend and I drunkenly booting up Red Dead Redemption last year and slowly ushering a single hen all the way out of the first town while doing a bad impression of John Marston calling himself the Chicken Sheriff. That’s comedy.
I think games perhaps have a semi-unique chance to make self referential jokes work in a way that other mediums don’t since the act of playing a previous game ensures a certain degree of buy-in.
One of the only jokes I can think of that got an intentional laugh from me was in Destiny 1 where Cayde is talking about Eris Morn it works as a straight line, but is also a reference to Bungie’s first game;
I was gonna send you off with a pithy joke, but Eris started droning on about the Pathways into Darkness or some damn thing, got distracted… anyway, one more beacon to go, if you’d be so kind.
Some of my favorite humor in games that’s not in Lucasarts or Doublefine games comes from Katamari games and the later Yoko Taro games (Nier, Drakengard 3, Nier: Automata). What those Yoko Taro games and Katamari Forever have in common is excellent localization work from 8-4 (Katamari Damacy is also very funny, but not localized by 8-4). Some of the best jokes in all of these games are character-driven, although things like the airship gag in Drakengard 3 and a lot of the other meta- humor in that game is really strong.
Earthbound made me laugh a few times, and games like the Mario & Luigi RPG series can be funny too.
I always cite this scene in GTA V and it’s my ‘PLEASE STOP’ moment with video game humor. There’s nothing offensive about it at all but this section and how long both characters talk and how you are forced to go through this entire thing was painful. Paaaaaainful.
On the other hand, I enjoy it when games are overly serious and subtly acknowledge it? Hitman is a super serious murder game on the surface, but in the first level the main model of the fashion show JUST happens to look like 47. There’s also the part where throwing a fire extinguisher at someone’s face produces maybe the best foley work in games history. DOOM does this as well and I still laugh thinking about ‘Demonic invasion in progress’. I’ve recently been going through Max Payne and for a game about some guy avenging his dead family, Max’s monologuing and Sam Lake’s face pasted on Max make it hard not to laugh for most of that game.
I find video games so hard when it comes to comedy. As mentioned here, the Absurdity of Yakuza is hilarious and reminds me of Monty Python at times with how simply funny it is, both writing wise and mechanically.
Whilst games like GTA make me laugh constantly, it’s all down to its sandbox and interacting systems. It’ rare I find myself laughing at it’s writing and when I do it’s usually cheap (except in San An when somehow they manage to make the most real gaming moment with so few polygons, everyones reactions are hilarious).
But i’m pressed to remember a time a game has made me laugh out loud through it’s writing.
The games that I feel land best for me in terms of comedy, at least recently, are ones that don’t have a tonne of animation and have no voice acting.
Undertale and Night in the Woods made me laugh out loud multiple times and a lot of that was because the lack of voice acting created a “take this at your own pace” feeling that let me be as fast or slow as I wanted in the comedic (and dramatic) moments. But also the few times they force pauses in the dialogue to create pregnant pauses really work on me and has resulted in some really funny stuff. Both Undertale and NitW are well written without that but seriously the choice to exclude voice acting (NitW moreso because I think I recall Scott Benson mentioning that they were considering full VO at one point) was key to my enjoyment of both games.
Humor that works for me:
Mysterio Boss Fight - Spider-Man 2
Comes out of gameplay and subverted expectations.
Darkened Skye
4th Wall breaking, well acted, reasonably well written. Takes the ridiculousness of the game and its premise and runs with it.
Fable 2/3
Mocking References to the real world to draw thematic parallels. Builds background and mythology but also let’s you murder “Thomas Caidkin” for being a hack.
Super Mario RPGs/Paper Mario
Makes fun of tropes even as it revels in them. Self-aware but not a jerk about it.
This sort of thing is why I basically never watch animated movies, even critically acclaimed ones. People wax poetic about how wonderful and transporting movies like Inside Out and How to Train Your Dragon are, but they are absolutely packed with annoying jokes just in case you forgot the target audience is 7 years old. Around the 8th time someone told me “actually, -insert children’s film- is really good” only for me to watch it and discover it’s got a talking cheetah making Getting Jiggy Wit It references or something I stopped ever trusting people’s opinions on American animated films.
Video game jokes are exactly like that one dude on twitter who writes for the sonic cartoon and is kind of shit but is so fucking proud of his dumbass, trite jokewriting that he parades it around the second its aired
Yo, the Skittles game???
That thing was actually good??
The jokes in Psychonauts ranged from charming to cringey, but at least they corresponded to the visual aesthetic of the game. Together the script and the graphics had a coherent perspective, which is more than I can say about most games that try to be funny outside of Rockstar’s vivid “South Park with extra misogyny” style.
Goat Simulator and Frog Fractions are two examples of games that are built around humor from the ground up and succeed more than any game that tries to be funny by:
Doing lots of swears
Stereotype (I hate the ubisoft redneck; I have no cultural fondness for rednecks, but he’s the worst character in every franchise he’s airdropped into)
An unexpected dildo, chicken, or other noun which is just, so totally random! (Admittedly Goat Simulator is really pushing it here, but they transcend the trope by committing extremely hard)
But for every game that’s trying to use humor as a seasoning and not the main course, I really wish developers would shell out for some punch up sessions with successful comedians. I’m not ready to alternate between grim dark world and cringey monkey robot world forever.
I think you hit the nail on the head for why some game humor works for me because the examples you gave came from comedic writing with context rather than solely based on non-sequitur humor or cultural references. Usually dry wit or jokes based off actions/dialogue is what I like in general.
You mentioning Psychonauts made me suddenly remember the level where you’re stomping around the fishpeople city like an oversized kaiju, and they keep screaming commentary as you go (“Oh no, it WAS the orphanage… for dogs! It was the puppy orphanage, everyone!”). Which is maybe one of my favourite scenes in video game history, so thank you :")
Right; like, with the Rockstar open-world humour, it feels like someone just went “let’s punch this up by putting a Joke™ here, just because! laughs!” — versus more naturalistic funny dialogue that still would’ve genuinely made you laugh if you’d seen it in e.g. a TV show or movie. It coming about through two-way dialogue, rather than one NPC chattering at an unresponsive MC, also usually helps. I think.
I keep thinking back on the opening of Saints Row 4, which I happen to think is generally a pretty great excersice in humor through subversion of genre tropes, where you are climbing the nuke flying through the air and then out of nowhere “Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing” by Aerosmith starts playing, and it completely punctures all tension of the moment and turns into this incredible fucking joke. Those last two numbered Saints Row games in general had some amazing fucking humor. And also some very bad stuff, as well.
I think the most extreme examples of this are where you have to write off an entire game because it’s entire premise is based on a really off-target gag. One exmple for me is The Deadly Tower of Monsters by Atlus which tries to riff on vintage sci-fi B movies and be Mystery Science Theatre 3000 at the same time. The obvious flaw being they’ve no subject matter to point fun at except their own game. Totally tone deaf and embarrassing, had to delete it from my ps4 to hide the evidence.
Side note, still love noble Commander Shepard shamelessly giving the exact same promo soundbite to literally every store on the citadel. They can’t ALL be you favourite! Pick a side for once in your life!
Sometimes a good GM can see where it’s going and respond, but it really comes down to how much a group is (or is willing to be) invested in the story.
the walk animation that they give the boss when they’re stuck in the Leave It To Beaver simulation is still really fucking funny.
I find myself laughing at Yakuza 0 just because it is completely unafraid to change tones every six seconds and have super-dramatic animations for the most mundane things. The animation for picking up the phone on the Horny Section of the game is great. The fact that Majima and Kiryu both have substories where they’re like “I guess there’s more than one kind of daddy” is also great.
