You know what you don’t see a lot of these days? Comedy games. There’s no shortage of hilarious books and movies whose sole intent is to make the audience laugh but that’s not so common in games. Is there a reason for that? Does the interactive nature of games make it impossible for a comedic game to exist?

No, obviously there are games that make us laugh but most that do so, do it through their writing which achieves nothing more than a book or film could do. Their interactivity means that games can draw players into a story in ways that other media can’t, so why is it that most games resort to their writing for humour, and is a comedic game that relies entirely on its mechanics even possible?

I think it’s pretty clear why most games that want to be funny only let the comedy come through in their dialogue: everyone knows how to write jokes. You think of something funny and have a character say it. So when a developer sits down to make a game and wants his players to laugh out loud then sure they’ll write funny character dialogue and item descriptions but that’s not really achieving anything that couldn’t be done in a book or a film. If 90% of a comedy film is dialogue that’s fine. It’s only an hour or two long but if 90% of a game is dialogue then that might be fine too but it probably wouldn’t be very funny.

Most games released these days are at least 5 hours long and a lot of that time is spent actually playing it rather than watching cut scenes play out, so how can a developer make the actual gameplay funny? They’ve got to rely on their mechanics if they want to get laughs.

Let’s have a look at how Octodad keeps you laughing throughout. For those who don’t know, in Octodad you take on the role of an octopus disguised as a man. He’s got a human wife and family and everyone is completely oblivious to the fact he’s an octopus apart from this one chef who really wants to cook him. Each level has you doing completely mundane things. Like early on you’re just getting out of bed and making breakfast and later levels have you taking your kids around an aquarium while you avoid the scientists who might recognise you. However, what makes it funny is how you achieve these things.

Octodad

You control Octodad by pressing different buttons to move his arms and legs. Unlike in a typical 3D game you can’t just press forward on the analogue stick to go forward, you’ve got to stretch your tentacles out and latch onto bits of the environment to get around. Octodad’s stretchy limbs and the unwieldy control scheme make just navigating the levels difficult but it’s a completely ridiculous spectacle and watching him flop around is just hilarious. What makes it so funny is the subversion of the player’s expectations and the juxtaposition of mundane objectives being incredibly difficult to complete.

Movement is supposed to be one of the easiest parts of any game; here it’s as obtuse as it could be and that’s the whole joke.
And notice I said “joke”, singular. There is only the one joke in Octodad repeated over and over just in different settings. You’re always trying to move around inconspicuously, using the ridiculous controls. It’s a good thing then that it only lasts for 2 hours. I think this brevity is the key to the game’s comedy. Levels are short, lasting around a half hour each and the game is over before you get sick of the joke. If it went on any longer there just wouldn’t be enough original material to keep it interesting and you can only see or hear a joke so many times before it stops being funny.

Another thing Octodad has going for it is that it relies almost entirely on physical humour. There are cutscenes and dialogue that are well written but most of what makes it funny is the physicality of his movement . This, I think, is how it overcomes one of the problems games have with comedy. Books and movies are the same every time. No matter how often you watch or read them, they play out the same with suitable timing between the set ups and the punch lines. Non interactive media have the luxury of controlling that timing but thanks to their interactive nature, games do not.
You could set up a really funny joke in a game but if the player doesn’t react properly then it falls flat on its face, ironically much less funnier than when Octodad does.

Games are in this unique position where the person consuming the media has to participate and that means they kind of have to make their own jokes. If you’re really good at Octodad you can play perfectly and it won’t be that funny. It’ll be impressive but nobody’ll be laughing. So really if a game wants to be mechanically humorous it has to give the player a set of tools to play with and put them in comedic situations rather than specifically setting up jokes.

Beseige

Besiege is a good example of this. Like Octodad it gives you a seemingly simple objective and makes it difficult. It’s your goal to destroy a building that’s usually right in front of you and you achieve this by building a machine. Unlike Octodad you’re given a set of tools to build with rather than just movement mechanics. This means it’s literally up to the player to make the jokes. Now, let me clarify that besiege isn’t a straight up comedy game. It’s funny but it doesn’t have to be. Like before, if you’re good at it you’ll be able to build really cool machines like this one.

If you’re most people you’ll build shitty machines like mine and laugh as they fail spectacularly. Yeah it’s a little frustrating that it doesn’t work but that frustration goes away when you build an epic death machine and the only thing it can destroy is itself.

But see here’s the thing. It’s not a comedic game at its core. Most of the time you’re playing, you’re not laughing because you should be trying to actually solve the puzzles you’re presented with and it’s only funny when you fail. This right here might be the crux of the issue. You can’t depend on a player to time a joke properly or come up with a witty one liner but you can put them in tricky situations where it’s easy to fail, in other words you can set them up for some slapstick, the basis for which is making light of pain and suffering.

Jazzpunk

Let’s mix things up and go back to a game that was made to be funny. For this video I played Jazzpunk for the first time and it brought to light an interesting aspect of comedy in gaming. It’s overall story is more absurd than funny but it gives you an excuse to explore a world that is filled with jokes and gags. If Jazzpunk were a stand up comic it’d be one of those guys who just throws out one liner after one liner with few stories in between. But it does make use of the interactive element of the medium to make you laugh. Most of the time it’s through subversion of your expectation, which covers a lot of comedy really.

What happens in Jazzpunk is that you explore the world and you just click on everything and everyone in it to see what will happen. You never expect what’s coming and it’s usually so absurd you can’t help but laugh, even if it’s more of an uncomfortable giggle because you have no idea what’s going on.
Like when you walk into this room full of ming vases and pick up a fly swatter. The obvious goal is to kill the flies without damaging the vases but actually the owner will be pleased if you break them because she wants the insurance money. Following on from that, if you slap the random NPCs with the fly swatter they sort of turn into flies and buzz away off. It’s just so bizarre it made me laugh every time.

Jazzpunk also uses that interactivity to make you laugh and also feel clever. Towards the end you fight the final boss in a Virtual Boy tennis match. Like with the vases there’s an obvious solution; win the match. However, to actually win you pick up a chair and just smack him with it. I particularly like how the game rewards you for embracing its ridiculous logic while also cracking a joke. I just wish there had been more of that.

Initially I was going to criticise Jazzpunk for the fact that it plays out more like a sandbox of interactive jokes rather than using its core mechanics to induce laughter but then I realised that most of this stuff is only as funny as it is because you’re playing it. That level of interactivity is what makes it work. As a player you have certain expectations about game logic and what will happen when you do certain things. Those expectations are then exploited to make you laugh. And while these same comedic scenes could be presented in a movie or described in a book they wouldn’t have anywhere near the same punch as they have when they’re happening directly to you.

The Stanley Parable

I think the same could be said for the Stanley Parable. It goes for a minimalistic approach with only very basic mechanics. You can walk and move, no shooting or even running or jumping. There’s even an achievement for trying to jump too many times. But it does manage to get a few laughs just using those three elements and the key to it is the narrator’s personality and the fact he reacts to everything you do. Obviously the witty writing and the Narrator’s dry cocksure delivery of the lines amplify the comedic effect but it has more of an impact because he’s reacting to your actions in a seamless and natural way.

If you play it straight, it’s like he’s narrating a pre-prepared story and it’s all very straightforward. But the second you stray from that path he acknowledges it and will often use that as an opportunity to berate the player. I wouldn’t say it pulls it off perfectly though. While I personally wasn’t blown away by the Stanley Parable as so many people were, I do admire its use of the interactive medium. Even though all you’re doing is walking and clicking on things, it does remain engaging for a time, but not for a long time I don’t think. Like the first couple of times you run through it’s funny but there are 19 endings to see and that means you’ll be going down the same corridors a lot. In my opinion, this takes away a lot of the fun because you end up rushing through the beginning areas to find the room where you need to go left instead of right to trigger a different scene.
So now that we’ve analysed these games, what conclusions can we draw from them?

Lessons Learned

Firstly, there seem to be two basic approaches; you can either focus on one core idea like Octodad and build on it or you can constantly present the player with new things like Jazzpunk.

The second and possibly most important thing to keep in mind is that if you want your game to focus on comedy, it should be brief. Octodad, Jazzpunk and The Stanley Parable are all short games. For the most part they don’t let their ideas get worn out through repetition.

Lastly, players can make their own comedy by messing around with game mechanics but some direction is needed in order to keep things funny. As we saw in Besiege, it’s very funny when you make a blunder but that only happens if you’re significantly challenged which requires levels to designed rather than just giving the player complete freedom with a set of tools.
And that’s my analysis of games that try and use their mechanics for comedic effect. I hope you found it interesting and I’d like to hear about any games I missed that do this sort of thing well.

And if you’re hankering for more of this kind of content, check out our archive of analyses!