Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone, Tomasz Z. Majkowski, and Jaroslav Švelch: Video Games and Comedy

Video Games and Comedy is an ambitious and timely book that covers plenty of ground in one collection and provides an excellent starting point for those looking to explore the crossovers of these two fields. The book draws strength from what could also be interpreted as a challenge: there are sixteen chapters in addition to the introduction, which means a collection of breadth rather than depth throughout the snappy chapters. However, this allows the reader to see the different directions in which the research can develop, and provides a basis for that growth.

The introduction to the volume, co-authored by the editors, states “although play and comedy would seem to bear a natural affinity, there has to date been surprisingly little academic attention to their relationship” (p. 2). This book aims to address that gap across multiple natural affinities, including associations between play, comedy, and “arbitrary rules.” Whilst trivialization can often be an issue where comedy is involved, the editors remind us of (and authors throughout the book show us) the multiple ways comedy can be significant: humor can be used as a critique; satire and in-jokes can be an important part of community building, including self-mockery; and carnivalesque elements of video games can transgress taboo boundaries, yet can also re-inscribe problematic elements and oppression. The editors also argue that parody can become a new “genre-forming force” (p. 12): a claim that is supported through multiple chapters in the collection that focus on parody in video games.

The first section of the book, “Scaffolding and How to Fall Off It: Theories and Concepts” explores different ways that video games can incorporate comedy. The section is kicked off by Nele van de Mosselaer, who explores how the dual position of the player allows them to take the roles of both laughing subject and comedic object. The chapter presents various ways in which incongruity between situations in games can lead to humorous ends. The author also explores the humor generated when there is a gap between how seriously gamers can take playing versus the ultimately inconsequential actions and outcomes. Dooley Murphy is up next, with a clear definition of gags and the difference between visual and action-based gags in games. Murphy argues that player action is crucial to a gag’s payoff through pre-planning of game design or through responses to scripted game events. Given the focus on timing in many forms of comedy – and the difficulties of controlling timing in video games – Murphy looks to how gags can be premised in the different rhythms and mechanics of games.

Daniel Heßler then shifts emphasis to puzzle punchlines that prank the player in a discussion of The Secret of Monkey Island. Heßler argues that these puzzle punchlines switch emphasis between player, presentation, and mechanics and thereby “capitalise on ambiguity of presentational signs and player expectations in relation to the mechanics” (p. 86). Following this, Manuel Garin explores slapstick visual comedy around bodies in space in Super Smash Bros and Super Mario. The chapter explores interesting links between slapstick visual comedy, bodies in space, and historical Japanese entertainment practices, arguing that each require improvisation and training in skill set to navigate the space. Garin suggests games such as Super Smash Bros include characters that each have an independent style as a form of choreography, and that these are brought together through group play. In the final chapter of the first section, Wyatt Moss-Wellington and Paul Martin address humor in puzzle games. They consider different ways that puzzles can map onto humor theories, including incongruity theory, relief theory (once the puzzle is solved), and benign violation theory. Moss-Wellington and Martin argue that the “aha” moment in puzzle solving can be humorous, so that while we might feel violated by a puzzle “calling out” our shortcomings when we can’t solve it, in the moment of solution, it is rendered benign through an “aha” moment.

Section Two, “Clowning Around: Contexts, Cultures, and Communities,” addresses comedy in different historical, geographic, and community contexts. The section begins with three chapters exploring national contexts. The first, written by Petri Saarikoski, Antti Lindfors, Jaakko Suominen, and Markku Reunanen, explores not a game but a prank in the Finnish context. An article written 1989 in the magazine MikroBitti went into elaborate detail about a “forthcoming” game, Illuminatus. However the whole thing was an April Fools’ prank. Whilst Saarikoski et al. theorize the article in relation to pranks, they also make a compelling argument for the whole affair to be considered as a cultural digital object, and propose a potential field of “imaginary game studies.” Moving further East, Alesha Serada explores how Russian anecdotes, previously carried through oral traditions, can now be circulated digitally and remediated through videogames such as Red Comrades Save the Galaxy. Given some of the problematic representations in the game, it might have been beneficial for the author to delve more deeply into a discussion of the issues around the stereotypes being perpetuated. However, it is illuminating to see this considered in relation to “a particular shade of sarcastic humor known as ‘stiob’ in the Russian language […] there is nothing sacred, everything must be deconstructed and laughed at, particularly the symbols that bear meaning important to others” (p. 168). Finally, Filip Jankowski’s chapter analyses French games in the 1980s as satirical political commentary. This chapter situates three games Paranoïak, Infernal Runner, and Hawaii in terms of the French political movements of the time and argues that “French programmers and designers […] used this medium for expressing their concerns about their country’s direction” (p. 175) and that “[u]nhappy times such as economic and political crises may be fodder for satirical games” (p. 176).

Shifting from national to community contexts, Sebastian Möring’s chapter offers an exploration of bisociation theory as an example of incongruity through a study of parodies of Tetris, including a “metagame,” Tuper Tario Tros (TTT), that combines mechanics of Super Mario Bros and Tetris. The author argues that whilst humorous parodies can elicit an appreciative response for those familiar with the original, the humor can also reveal something about gameplay logic. Here, then, it is argued that “parodies of Tetris may be capable of unveiling the True Reality of playing Tetris” (p. 192). Agata Zarzycka then turns to YouTube videos that parody the experience of being both a player and character. Zarzycka offers a convincing analysis of how these videos capitalize on in-jokes that help build and define the community, thereby reclaiming power by managing the potential for embarrassment through self-commentary. Closing out the second section, Mateusz Felczak documents how comedy facilitates participation in eSports streaming. Felczak argues that humorous activity emerges through three main frames: the production, the audience, or the players themselves. Production-related humor is evident in the ways the commentators use on-screen situations as triggers for emergent comedy, while audience humor is often based on intertextual references and copy pastas that are posted using the chat function. Meanwhile, the corporeality of the players plays a large role, as multiple cameras try to capture events and reactions from several angles to playback in humorous montages.

The final section of the book, “Five Ways to Spoil a Joke: Case Studies” is concerned with critical and political approaches to comedy in games and contains some of the strongest chapters. To open, Darshana Jayemanne and Cameron Kunzelman offer a critical case study of the game Civilization, its representation of Gandhi, and the lore surrounding the development of its Gandhi character. Engaging with both cultural and comedy theory, the authors propose that games can create a new kinds of “cybernetic” irony that involves both cultural and technical elements. The chapter addresses the problematic aspects of racial humor in games in the context of the specific case study of “Nuclear Gandhi” in Civilization, presenting the robust argument that the subversion of racialized stereotypes is used to code this Gandhi with humor: “Nuclear Gandhi is ‘funny’ because he ironically breaks the raced and colonized ‘rules’ of representation within the game space” (p. 256–257). Continuing the discussion of irony, Rory K. Summerley draws on Akihiro Kitada’s idea of cynical intimacy: “the apparent paradox of audiences being intimately involved with media while simultaneously denigrating it through the same media literacy” (p. 294). This concept is employed in an analysis of Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes, which, Summerley suggests, parodies games, gamers, and game developers in one fell swoop. With reference to a range of literature, the author suggests that while ironies need not be exclusionary, they become so within the context of communities, where irony functions as a kind of dialect.

There are also two chapters in this section that address the role of sexual humor in video games. Samuel Poirier-Poulin explores comedy, queerness and sex through an analysis of Coming Out on Top. Poirier-Poulin argues that while humor addressing gay identity and sexuality can often be used in negative ways, it can also create safe spaces. Poirier-Poulin shows how, whilst dating sims have often been heteronormative, gay-themed visual novels and dating sims have reclaimed this space. He convincingly argues that the subversion and queer potential of these games is clearly related to sexual and transgressive humor, and that this humor and banter allows closer emotional connection with the characters. Caroline Bem’s chapter looks at humor in the pornographic browser game, Uddertale, as a form of pastiche. Bem offers a considered analysis of gamic parodic humor, and explores the complexity of the game and the humor that it hides. On the one hand, Bem suggests, Uddertale could be considered to trivialize rape and pedophilia. On the other hand, it could be experimentation for kink communities. In either case, Bem argues, “humour serves as a screen, as a way to obscure the game’s true moral positioning, if it even exists” which “allows it to sidestep any serious ethical positioning” (p. 318–319).

The final chapter in the collection is Rob Gallagher’s “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore (Or Is It?): On Hitman and Gamer Humour(lessness).” The chapter explores the ways in which both promotional materials and games themselves have the potential to be read as either humorous or humorless, which Gallagher posits links to broader elements of humor and what some see as a societal shift to humorlessness and questions (often gendered) of “who can take a joke.” Gallagher suggests that Hitman could be seen as righteous satire – mocking the NPC caricatures who are often depicted as narcissists – but he also addresses unsettling elements to the game and its circulation, including the creation of disturbing content featuring virtual violence against women. Considering the back and forth battle of this content being censored on YouTube, Gallagher suggests that “[t]he series’ brand of violent satire offers us a way into that fraught space where humor shades into humorlessness, raising questions as to when a joke stops being funny and who is a legitimate target of ridicule” (p. 335).

In the introduction to Video Games and Comedy, the editors make a compelling argument that games open up three recurring medium specific elements of comedy: computation/simulation, player interaction, and game design. Simulation, they suggest, allows absurdity, through glitches and physics. Interaction with the player allows comedic instances, for example “ridiculing player effort” in so-called “fumblecore” games (p. 17). Meanwhile, the subversion of game conventions and hierarchies of game design can also be comedic. The collection as a whole robustly justifies this trifold argument. The scope of the topics, types of games, and types of humor covered across the collection are an asset. Chapters that take more of a critical cultural studies angle consider some of the intersectional issues apparent in video games, and where humor has been utilized in both problematic and subversive ways. The chapters address concepts and topics that are ripe for further exploration, and so the edited collection delivers on both its promise and provocation. It will, I am sure, go on to open many doors to further research both from the included authors and others picking up their work.