October Musings: Being Funny

I discovered System Mastery a year or two ago, and it quickly became one of my favorite podcasts. In it, Jef and Jon go over old and usually bad RPGs and crack jokes along the way. One thing that’s emerged is how comedy RPGs are bad more often than not. There are some gems like Ghostbusters, but a lot of unfortunate attempts at writing a humor book with game rules tucked in. Humor writing is hard to do well, and you don’t see the likes of David Sedaris or John Hodgman trying their hand at game design. The big disconnect is that what a comedy RPG needs to be good is to provide a framework that helps foster laughs, rather than a joke book that’s also an RPG. One of Jef’s big complaints about comedy RPGs is that the attempts at humor end up not only being bad in their own right, but they also go into the actual rules, making it that much worse as an actual game. HoL having a skill called “Making Sharp Things Go Through Soft Things That Scream and Bleed” is sort of funny on the page maybe, but sounds incredibly stupid and annoying to have to reference repeatedly in order to play the game.

I don’t think making an RPG funny is hard exactly, especially since the medium’s most dominant game is D&D, which generates a whole lot of laughter. When you have people sitting down to pretend to be elves, it’s a challenge to get a group into a frame of mind where anything serious can happen. D&D’s tendency to be ridiculous isn’t intentional, but a confluence of the choices that went into it, which some of the game’s folk traditions tend to heighten.

If D&D is an unintentional comedy game, and one that generates more laughs than a lot of RPGs that get marketed as comedy games, it’s helpful to look at why. There’s a whole field of humor studies, which has produced several competing theories about what makes people laugh and why. The book The Humor Code by Joel Warner and Peter McGraw presents McGraw’s “benign violation theory” by way of a chronicle of he and journalist Joel Warner traveling all over the world experiencing different kinds of comedy firsthand. Benign violation theory is basically the idea that laughter comes from violations of actual or perceived norms in ways that the audience can find benign. The theory isn’t a recipe for crafting good joke—you’re not likely to come up with something good by mechanically picking out violation and making it benign—but it’s a useful lens for understanding how a joke affects the audience.

D&D draws a ton of inspiration from mythology and fantasy literature, but it explicitly doesn’t try to recreate those kinds of narratives. Gygax would get letters from fans asking why a given thing in D&D doesn’t work like in Lord of the Rings, and he’d reply that D&D is D&D and not a Tolkien simulator. D&D tends to foster games where you have a diverse group of characters with divergent motivations and few ties to the world around them, and those characters go into a world that’s full to the brim with tropes taken from every corner of mythology and fantasy literature, plus some truly strange original elements. Add in the distance between player and character, and PCs wind up being weird “murderhoboes,” who wander the land killing things and taking anything that isn’t nailed down. They also quickly become much more powerful and wealthy than average people, so they tend to run roughshod over normal society until a more powerful authority figure steps in.

There’s also the swingy d20, which lets characters randomly be transcendent or total chumps regardless of their purported level of competence. Critical hits were a popular house rule (that Gygax opposed), and while the D&D team at Wizards of the Coast has made them a routine part of the game for the past 20 years, a lot of people operate on the informal assumption that a natural 20 on any check is an exceptional success that ignores the DM’s original plans. A whole lot of funny D&D anecdotes involve a character getting a natural 20 that lets them do something incredible and out of character.

All of that utterly thwarts our ideas about how the fantasy genre is supposed to work. In books Gandalf is always dignified and Elric isn’t going to lose Stormbringer to a hungry rust monster. Your D&D characters meanwhile have a small but very real chance of getting a roll that makes their supposed areas of competence utterly meaningless, which can be hilarious or frustrating depending on how benign of a violation that turns out to be.

While deliberately creating a serious RPG is oddly hard, making a consistently funny game is nonetheless a challenge. In video games (like Undertale or Portal) and board games (like Space Alert) humor often comes down to writing more than anything. Party games like Apples to Apples can draw humor out of unconventional juxtapositions and teasing out the dynamics of the group playing the game. While party games are designed to do that—you could argue it’s their primary function—other games also have emergent comedy from social interactions and odd juxtapositions of the game’s elements. There are a few jokes and Easter eggs in Halo for example, but none of them made my friends laugh anywhere near as much as the time that Chris got a kill on Mike by firing a rocket towards a jeep and timing it just right so that the jeep slammed into Mike when he chased Chris through a portal. (It’s funnier if you were there and if you know the Chris and Mike I’m talking about.)

Generally speaking, a really good RPG has a clear premise that it supports well. I have my share of criticisms about D&D, but its iconic status is in part because it has a simple and cohesive premise at its core. The better comedy RPGs support their tendency to foster comedy in part by putting a benign violation at the heart of the core premise.

The setting of Paranoia is Alpha Complex, which is a blatant sci-fi dystopia, where everyone worships a malfunctioning computer as they live under a ridiculous, paranoid, bureaucratic, surveillance state that gets people killed nearly as fast as it can push them out of cloning tanks. It rips into cold war fears by making “commie mutant traitors” the main boogeyman of a mad computer, and while your troubleshooter PCs usually aren’t exactly having a good time, they tend to get reduced to a smoking boot and quickly replaced with the next clone, letting this massive violation become benign.

Part of what makes the premise of Ghostbusters so compelling is that it takes ghosts—something that in horror movies people are barely even able to survive—and turns them into things that your local Ghostbusters will take care of with all the nonchalance of an exterminator spraying for termites. Particularly with the addition of the conceit of the canonical Ghostbusters starting a franchising program, it makes an eminently gameable premise.

Maid RPG not only has the conceit of maids serving a master who is blatantly weaker than them, but it uses randomness to such an extent that the dice continually thwart our ideas about basically everything. You can roll up a chainsaw-wielding cyborg mermaid out for revenge as your character, and if you’re using the random event rules it’s entirely possible that your quiet day at the mansion will devolve into a series of ninja attacks and dimensional portals. Not everyone finds role-playing as fetishized anime maids to be a benign violation, but it did find an audience.

With Dragon World (my Powered by the Apocalypse RPG inspired by fantasy comedy anime, most notably Slayers and Dragon Half), I’ve been trying to make a comedy RPG that works a bit better for longer play and (somewhat) more coherent stories. As much as I’ve enjoyed Maid RPG (enough to have the dubious idea to publish an English version), it’s tended to produce a lot of frenetic, exhausting one-shots. Longer comedic stories let you give things more time to breathe, and can build up characters and contexts that give you that much more scaffolding for launching jokes. Doing a comedy can get you some leeway you might not have in a more serious genre, but the elements of good storytelling remain the same.

Lately I’ve been trying to work a bit more on I Hate You, my two-player storygame inspired by a certain subset of Looney Tunes shorts. That’s partly just because the pandemic is still making it hard to actually get groups of friends together, so something that I can play relatively quickly and one-on-one is about all that will really work for me right now.

HBO Max has basically every Looney Tunes thing imaginable in its library, from black and white shorts of the 1930s up through the more familiar ones in color with the characters in their recognizable forms, all the way to Space Jam and no less than three more recent reboots of various types. Clearly someone at WB really wants Looney Tunes to still be a thing. I suspect it’s one of those things that manages to be popular under our noses, or at least popular enough for WB to justify making more cartoons, because Tweety Bird is still a thing on boomer memes and airbrushed T-shirts, and Taz is a weirdly popular motif in tattoos. Some of the new cartoons are deliberately different, like how The Looney Tunes Show is formatted a bit more like a sitcom about Bugs and Daffy being roommates, while New Looney Tunes and Looney Tunes Cartoons are more in line with the classic shorts, albeit sometimes with updated cultural references.

Looney Tunes shorts form their benign violations in a few different ways. They bring a vaudeville sensibility to the screen in animated form, with the slapstick and wordplay cranked up a notch as the animators take advantage of the medium (though the racial aspects of that period of comedy do rear their ugly head at times), playing with our notions of the flow of conversation and even the laws of physics. A more central thing that serves as the core of I Hate You is the recurrent (though not universal) through-line of an inverted predator vs. prey rivalry. In nature, predators win out over prey more often than not, because otherwise they wouldn’t survive as predators. Prey animals have defense mechanisms, but those are more to do with running away and breeding quickly. A non-literal “predator” like a human hunter will be able to hunt and kill rabbits, and probably won’t come back from hunting trips empty-handed, so when Bugs Bunny outwits Elmer Fudd, the rabbit becomes an underdog we can root for. A huge portion of Looney Tunes (as well as some other cartoons of the era like Pink Panther and Tom and Jerry) follow the same general pattern, and there are even a few “switch hitter” characters (notably Daffy Duck and Foghorn Leghorn) who can be predator or prey depending on who’s opposite them.

At the risk of getting a little pretentious, I see echoes of mythical tricksters in these characters. They’re toned down from (for example) the disfigurements that Reynard the Fox delivered to some of his antagonists, but they’re still stories that tell us that the little guy can win, and brains can beat brawn. It fits into America’s general love of underdogs, despite the nation being more of an overdog in real life. I don’t know that the mythical underpinnings are what made me or anyone else enjoy cartoons, but they are part ever what makes them interesting to me on an intellectual level, along with the way they’re time capsules of American culture.

On the Yaruki Zero Games page on DTRPG, I set up categories for Serious RPGs and Comedy RPGs, but I wound up having pretty much all of my games except Magical Fury go in the comedy bucket. I didn’t set out to primarily be a creator of comedy, but that seems to be where I ended up going, so I’ve tried to think about the topic in greater depth. I don’t know how much that has actually helped me do it better, but it’s been interesting at least.