Comedy’s hard to do correctly — just read through this blog for irrefutable proof of that fact. The main reason is that comedy is subjective by nature. What one person finds funny, another may not. There’s no possible way to please everyone, but comedy is comprised of individual elements which, when combined correctly, are more likely to generate laughs than a random gag thrown in out of context.
There’s the intellectual element: understanding the joke. If you don’t get it, you don’t laugh, and you feel like a pillock.
There’s the whole technical element. I mentioned above about context. If a joke about a particular situation is told outside of that situation, it’s shit. If it’s told at the wrong time, it’s shit. If it’s told out of context and out of time, it should carry the death penalty.
Finally, there’s the human element: imagining yourself being part of the joke, and being able to relate to it on that level. The obvious flaw in video game humour is that it’s difficult to relate to someone/something who/that isn’t real.
Michael “The Brainy Gamer” Abbott discussed these elements (using better language, naturally) on his blog when discussing this very subject. By the way, if you’re not familiar with The Brainy Gamer (if you care about games you should be) then I suggest you remedy that situation immediately.
Anyway, the point I’m laboriously trying to make is that if playing through the Monkey Island games taught me one thing, it’s that video game humour isn’t what it used to be. In MI, almost everything is funny. Not just occasional one-liners from the protagonist, not the token idiot NPC or wacky ethnic sidekick, it’s just genuinely laugh-out-loud funny all the way through. This is partly due to the strength of the writing, which ties all of the above elements together beautifully, but it’s also because it’s lighthearted, doesn’t take itself seriously and, most importantly, it’s set in a cartoonish fantasy world. And it has three-headed monkeys.
I know I said a few paragraphs up that it’s hard to relate to something that isn’t real, and that’s true. What’s also true is that it’s a million times harder to relate to something that isn’t real and is trying to pretend that it is.
The in thing right now when it comes to video games is “realism”, and no matter how closely a character resembles a real human being you’re never going to laugh at them because you’re two busy fighting off headaches and nausea.
Lots of games make me chuckle. Sometimes a single line really works, and that’s always a pleasant surprise. There’s one in the Prince of Persia remake about the Concubine enemy being like the Prince’s mum. That tickled me, but it was the only one in about ten thousand that had any effect. All too often these days it comes down to sarcastic player-character observations, which make me want to floss my ear canals with razor wire. When they’re trying too hard, the comedy dies.
If a game wants to be funny, then it needs to make that decision right from the very start. Proper comedy is developed all the way through — it’s fused with every aspect, not just the dialogue. Monkey Island is a shining example of how to do it right. We need more.
A popular current example of comedy in video games is Valve Software’s Portal, a title that is genuinely the comedic benchmark of modern gaming. The Portal formula generated a huge following, and as a result it was plagued by the usual problems: some people (idiots, I believe) thinking that just because something was funny in Portal, it will by default be just as funny everywhere else.
Some game designers believe that making a reference to something that has previously proved to be amusing will automatically make their product just as side-splittingly hilarious, when in actual fact it has the opposite effect. There’s a game on Xbox Live Arcade called ‘Splosion Man, which is set in a laboratory and has the player collecting cakes. As though that isn’t breathtakingly obvious enough, the achievement for collecting all of these cakes is called ‘Not A Portal Reference’. Sorry, Twisted Pixel Games, but you couldn’t have made a more obvious reference if you tried. Pointing to yourself and saying “Hey, look at us! We’re making a Portal reference!” doesn’t detract from the fact that you’re trying to be funny by ripping off something else.
I mentioned briefly earlier in this article about comedic timing and context. The whole cake thing is funny in Portal because it makes sense, but in anything else it doesn’t. If I approached someone who has never played the game, say for example my mum, and said “By the way, mum, the cake is a lie”, she wouldn’t laugh, she’d just look at me like I was a fucking lunatic. I could get on a stage and tell the punchlines to all of the best jokes I’d ever heard, but out of context none of them would be funny at all, and that’s an important aspect of comedy that needs to be remembered.
Also, the cake is a lie.
The Jobless Gamer 