It's All In Good Humor

[Bertylicious]

Wait, hang on, so we're making a distinction between a running gag and a self-referenctial gag, right? I seem to recall the writers of Black Adder were pretty fond of the former. Though they were all funny on their own merits, so... ok.

Also the metaphysical, keep-dancing-around-the-same-topic-to-go-to-deeper-and-deeper-layers, kind of humour seemed to work pretty well for Bill Hicks and that other fellow. Wossname. Roman poet who hated women and greeks. Juvenal, that one.

I don't disagree with you that the jokes you lambasted in the game you were talking about whose name I've already forgotton, we'll call it "Forced Parody 5: The Clickening", probably weren't funny. Only that you may not quite have gotten to the nub of why they weren't funny.

What's the difference between, say, Withnail saying that he's gone on holiday by mistake and a bloke farting? Both contain a sensible premise, a bloke just being and a man who is on holiday, then there is a twist which squeezes out the mirth; flatulance/man on holiday is miserable.

The first is undoubtedly funnier though, all because of the build up (why the man on holiday is miserable) and the complexity of that build up, how it engages us on multiple emotional levels. The bloke farting could have build up too, but is it likely to engage us emotionally? Perhaps, though in isolation we've all had shit holidays that we wanted to escape from and feel far more than we do about breaking wind.

I feel like I may be about to tip over into some diatribe about games being art so I'll stop there. Suffice is to say that it is unjustified to simply write off some forms or approaches to humour as it all comes down to the emotional potential of the effort.

Apart from puns though. Puns are objectively shit.

 

[Andy of Comix Inc]

The helmet in Duke Nukem Forever is the DOOM guy's helmet, actually. It's funny because Duke 3D was cut from the same cloth as DOOM, he just didn't wear any armour (yet was about as penetrable to bullets).

*sniff*

 

[Farther than stars]

But isn't "clashing a comedic tone with a dramatic one" what creates black comedy along the lines of the "Portal" series? And speaking of black comedy, the Fallout games are pretty funny when you read between the lines.

 

[yunabomb]

Am I the only person who noticed Yahtzee spelled "humor" the American way?

 

[Mahoshonen]

I think I Wanna Be The Guy has an interesting approach to humor. The sheer absurdity of it's difficulty forces you to laugh at yourself again and again. And I do believe it manages to cross the border from the dulldrums of referneces to actuall parody, at least some of the time. For example, the scene where The Kid and Dracula repeat the infamous SotN dialogue isn't what makes it funny (although Kid's squeaky voice makes it amusing), it's that the goblet Dracula throws at the end can kill you just like everything else in the game. And the timing is perfect as well-if you don't move, the goblet hits you just as Dracula finishes saying "WHAT IS A MAN?!" "*death soundclip, Game Over riff*" Humor, like many subjective feelings, is all about timing.

 

[tautologico]

Ok, maybe I am in the minority here, but I was surprised to find the humor in Brutal Legend pretty damn good. Specially surprised since I am not a big fan of Heavy Metal or Jack Black...

It is good, and I may be wrong but I don't think most people complain about the humor when they complain about Brütal Legend. It seems the gameplay was perceived as the major problem. I, however, love the game.

Also, Jack Black's performance is quite good. He really created a voice for the character, instead of simply doing the same "Jack Black persona" as in most movies he's in.

 

[loudestmute]

It's been said in this thread before, but I'll say it again so that it sounds like there's some consensus here.

The Bard's Tale remake from a few years ago had its heart set in the right place at the very least, coming up with a logical yet humorous explanation for most of your standard RPG behavior.

Spoiler

Q: Why are you going around breaking every barrel in town?
A: There's a shady cooper needs to inflate his business numbers, and he's paying very...okay, well at least he's paying.

Q: Why go to the ends of the game world to save the girl?
A: Did you see her rack? That's two good reasons right there!
Q: But...your main adversaries seem convinced she might be pretty evil instead.
A: They're just repressed is all, can't handle the thought of a benevolent princess in a well-ventilated corset.

The interplay between Cary Elwes' nameless bard and Tony Jay's irate narrator is also endearing.

Is it a fun game? Sure. Is it a deep game? Well...no. It's a hack and slash RPG that decided Diablo was too nerdy and cut out much of the character progression and role customization. There's plenty of button mashing combat to be had, but it's brief enough that you end up feeling like you're merely hammering on the fast forward button to get to the next bit of dialogue the designers are oh so proud of.

I think it falls into that Killer7 type of game, in that both titles should be experienced on a wider scale, so long as the audience knows that the mechanics aren't quite as entertaining as the rest of the presentation.

 

[Therumancer]

Err, well yes... my basic opinion was that "Unwritten Tales" seemed derivitive. To be honest fantasy parodies are a dime a dozen, going back to the dark ages of "Bored Of The Rings" (and probably before that) in pure text, and then of course you've literally had dozens of games doing the same basic things with fantasy tropes, which is where I disagree, since pure comedy, especially in adventure games, is REALLY common. As far as fantasy trops go, you can go back to things like the old "Spellcasting 101" games, and even recently we've has things like "Grotesque Tactics" (two games, Evil Heroes, and Dungeons and Doughnuts). When it comes to comedies in game form... there are just so many going back to things like "Space Quest" and "Rex Nebular & The Cosmic Gender Bender" to more recent fare like "Saint's Row 3" which is pretty much an absurdist comedy from beginning to end.

In paticular when it comes to the adventure game genere, I think comedies are almost as common as hydrogen molecules. To me the purely serious ones tend to be what sticks out, I guess because the very nature of the games (absurd solutions to absurd puzzles) doesn't work well when taken seriously for the most part.

 

[Therumancer]

I feel like if anyone DEATH should be allowed to morose all the time lol

unfortunately it seems the opposite of a super serious lead character just leads to an annoyingly sarcastic and smugly overconfident character

Yes, DEATH should be grim and grumpy, but that should make him the perfect straight man to anything else.

While unrelated I always liked the way Neil Gaiman did Death in "Sandman" and I was hoping it would inspire more similar takes on it than it did.

 

[Therumancer]

But isn't "clashing a comedic tone with a dramatic one" what creates black comedy along the lines of the "Portal" series? And speaking of black comedy, the Fallout games are pretty funny when you read between the lines.

Black comedy typically has to do with the subject matter and it involving bad things within the realm of possibility happening. It includes things like grim, gallows humor, or at the low end dead baby jokes and the like.

Q: What's the differance between a truckload of bowling balls, and a truck load of babies?

A: You can use a pitchfork to unload the babies.


That's a form of black humor.

Portal achieved black humor through the context of the jokes in the setting, silly or overly benevolent things like being baited with the promise of cake in the context of a lab full of death traps for example. Differant style, same thing. The "black" portion being due to the lethal nature of the setting and the actual jeopardy present in context. In some ways similar to how you could actually use a pitchfork to unload a bunch of babies (stabbing and heaving them) it's within the realm of possibility, and thus brings that rather sick image to mind which is just plain wrong, but remotely possible.

 

[Therumancer]

I'm trying hard to think of actually funny games, but the Portal series is the only one that comes to mind. Even Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (free online now, thanks BBC) was mostly amusing more than downright funny. And Douglas Adams wrote the text!

Maybe it's just a pacing thing. Videogames have a pace somewhat determined by the player, so that's going to interfere with the timing of a joke. But it isn't a complete show stopper, as Portal demonstrated.

Too bad. I prefer laughing to super serious. I play games for entertainment.

Hmmm, well games like "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" and similar works tend to fail because anyone who buys them already by definition knows the source material well enough to already know (or predict) the gags as they happen. Things like "Monty Python's Complete Waste Of Time" pretty much followed this pattern.

That said, for relatively funny games your liable to mostly only find really old ones, today things have just gotten too politically correct (fear of offending someone) to really be funny. Also admittedly the funniest games in many cases seem to be some of the least well designed. The game "Keef The Thief" (chances are you've never heard of it) had some really good moments, but it could almost be painful to play even when it was new.

While the game was hardly a success, there was also a game called "Starship Titanic" that was written by Douglas Adams, which might fill the void if you could find it, since it covers the same kind of humor as "Hitchhikers" while not simply re-treading the old material. Likewise there was a "Callahan's Crosstime Saloon" game at one point if your a Spider Robinson fan.

I'm guessing you've already tried the well known ones (Quest For Glory, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Monkey Island, Spellcasting 101-202-303, Kingdom O' Magic, etc...).

For freeware if you like political satire look up "Liberal Crime Squad", which is a combination roguelike/management sim, where you take control of a pro-liberal terrorist organization.

 

[carpathic]

I think that the back and forth between Isabella and Aveline (Dragon Age 2) was some of the funniest stuff i've heard. Actually most Bioware games have really funny bits in them. I also quite enjoyed the dialogue in Hunted: The Demons Forge.

I totally agree. Garrus was outright hilarious at times, so was EDI.

Let us be serious, I am probably the least funny person in the world, but even I know most good comedy breaks down to Expectation and Reality not meeting up in some way. There are lots of funny people, you'd think games could easily access that resource.

 

[RobfromtheGulag]

Fallout's got humorous bits. And what's wrong with sarcasm!

 

[pln9fos]

There definitely have been numerous games in the past that were able to get much better laughs out of me than anything today. I think part of the problem may be something Yahtzee has brought up about today's games: they play everything far too safely. Even Sleeping Dogs (according to my other favorite game reviewer) supposedly takes very few risks. And don't get me started on Duke Nukem Forever; for a game that used referential humor to make fun of Halo, it's painfully ironic how that game seemed to be trying so hard to BE Halo.

It would be interesting in the future to see an Extra Punctuation article about HD re-releases; I'd be interested in seeing what Yahtzee thinks is the line between solely re-releasing a game for making more cash (although that's always to some degree going to be the main motive) or also doing so to give more exposure to an underrated gem of a past console generation. We've already got the Jak Trilogy, the "ICO" and "Shadow of the Colossus" collection, the Sly collection, two God of War collections (with a third on the way), and the impending HD re-release of Okami and the Ratchet and Clank collection.

 

[Farther than stars]

--snip--

My point is, that "realistic" aspect is dramatic in nature, wouldn't you agree?

 

[Therumancer]

--snip--

My point is, that "realistic" aspect is dramatic in nature, wouldn't you agree?

Not really, because it doesn't require any drama, just a degree of plausibility. I wrote things badly I guess. It's sort of like the baby joke I put up, there is no drama or tension there, it's just gross and wrong, and can pretty much be pulled out of everywhere.

The point is that Black Humor is a general thing, as opposed to referring to something very specific. It covers a lot of differant kinds of jokes and comedic set ups, it can involve Drama, but doesn't require it.

You'll notice a lot of stand up guys will use "pitch black humor" as a description of their routine, largely because of the subject matter and how it's likely grounded in reality, their routine however doesn't involve any real drama or build up at all, since they are just a dude on stage.

 

[Farther than stars]

My point is, that "realistic" aspect is dramatic in nature, wouldn't you agree?

Not really, because it doesn't require any drama, just a degree of plausibility. I wrote things badly I guess. It's sort of like the baby joke I put up, there is no drama or tension there, it's just gross and wrong, and can pretty much be pulled out of everywhere.

The point is that Black Humor is a general thing, as opposed to referring to something very specific. It covers a lot of differant kinds of jokes and comedic set ups, it can involve Drama, but doesn't require it.

You'll notice a lot of stand up guys will use "pitch black humor" as a description of their routine, largely because of the subject matter and how it's likely grounded in reality, their routine however doesn't involve any real drama or build up at all, since they are just a dude on stage.

I guess it depends on how you define drama. See, personally I'd call pitchforking babies to illustrate your joke relatively dramatic.

 

[BehattedWanderer]

so where would Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard fall into in this? the game had thoroughly bland mechanics, and was was extremely referential, but it did so in the same way that Mel Brooks movies are referential, and that made it a genuinely funny game for me.

Oh wow, someone else who's played that. I'd forgotten about that game. Really, that's how to handle humor in games, true enough--but then, parody like that is almost always appreciated. Still remember how overpowered the super soakers were. Shame about the game mechanics, though.

 

[retrochimp]

I wonder if you've played Chibi-Robo for the Gamecube, Mr. tzee. You've never mentioned it on the show and it seems like it would be an experience you'd want to have. It's approach is almost completely antithetical to the average game experience as your main objective is to make the other characters happy. It's a platform-y adventure game with quirky characters, a unique soundtrack, and a surprisingly serious message about energy consumption and family. Also, it is very funny, or at least I found it so.

 

[Draygera]

You know, the last AAA game that was actually fairly funny to me was Painkiller, oddly enough. The cutscenes were so terribly bad that they actually worked in its favor and could have been called comical