Ranking the 10 best, and 5 worst, comedy games of all time
Comedy in video games is hard—and these 15 titles prove it, for good and ill
Games Features Ellen McLain
It’s been a long, hard road for the art of being funny in video games. Comedy is a tricky beast in the best of cases, after all, and even moreso in a medium like games—which, more often than not, puts vital elements like pacing, focus, and perspective directly into the hands of the players, rather than designers or directors. (Imagine the nightmare of Mel Brooks trying to make a comedy where the audience is allowed to point the camera anywhere they want, or smash a button to skip through all the gags.)
And yet, games have been trying to be funny (with mixed results, sure, but trying) pretty much since there have been games, from the early days of Colossal Cave Adventure up through the modern day. Some of those games have succeeded spectacularly, creating incredible works of humor that incorporate the player’s own agency into their comedic designs, producing jokes and goofs that are not just brilliant, but interactive, inviting you to be an author of the comedy. Some have dropped John Goodman into a hot tub and asked him to sing, or decided that Rob Schneider might be the perfect narrator for a fantasy adventure. It takes all kinds!
We’re here, then, to catalogue the highs and the lows, compiling the list of the 10 best comedy games of all time—along with five of the worst. (And, FYI: In the interest of not packing the list with a handful of gut-busting franchises, we’ve restricted ourselves to a single entry per series.)
41 Comments
I am mystified (get it) that Disco Elysium didn’t make this list. While the game isn’t designed as a comedy, it has some of the funniest and cleverest writing in any medium in the past 20 years.
No joke, the most recent game to make me laugh out loud was Hitman 2 (or Hitman: World Of Assassination as it’s know now). There is some seriously dark humour here, carried off by David Bateson’s flawless deadpan:(SPOILERS)Oh, those Danes and their whacky sense of humour. Bateson’s been playing 47 for 23 years. And he knows exactly what to do with 47. His Hippo Wrangler delivery actually had me pause the game to get laughs out.
Also, I must also mention the entirety of Hitman 2’s “A Gilded Cage” mission, where those whacky Danes absolutely rip the piss out of the Swedes in a the sort good-natured Scandi animosity that only a thousand years of shared history. There’s an on-call masseur and you can kill a guy with a moose.
Fuck Loathing.
TWs all around: jickenwings.org.
Borderlands 2 deserves a spot on this list for Handsome Jack alone. And while the game overall is way too serious to qualify, the single funniest moment in gaming was the literal record scratch in Death Stranding. It was so unexpected and hilarious, especially coming immediately after Heartman’s tragic story. I had to pause the game until I could stop laughing.
The only thing that could make Handsome Jack better would be to have him voiced by H. Jon Benjamin. But Dameon Clarke is awesome. Too bad Randy had to fuck everything up for 3 just to try to pander to some 19-year-old titty streamers (I assume; it’s Rand we’re talking about).
Space Quest 3 was my favorite of the series, but I’m not sure I ever played 4 (or knew it existed). Glad to see Frog Fractions getting some love.
I am surprised Borderlands 2 is not on the list. That game was actually really funny.
Justice for the hot comedy stylings of Last of Us’s Ellie Williams and her joke books. Truly one of the great comedy games of all times
Lest we forget the sequels h-i-l-a-r-i-o-u-s golfing mini-game that puts the SPLAT! back into Splats-Stick.
The Space Quest series (and Sierra games in general) are what got me into gaming-and honestly got me into the joy of problem solving more than school ever did. I still love all those games.I would put the two modern South Park games on this list-Stick of Truth and Fractured But Whole. I laughed throughout. I am also playing Hi-Fi Rush right now, which has some pretty good humor.We need more comedy games!
Yeah Sierra sorta developed a bad rep (especially compared to LucasArts) but they were my obsession as a kid and teen in the 90s and still take up some real estate in my brain–and Space Quest was my fave of the comedy ones (though y fave games were probably the Laura Bow ones and then, a bit later, the genius Jane Jensen Gabriel Knight games.)
Oh yeah, the Laura Bow games were really good too!
I remember playing Space Quest X on the family computer and my mom got really mad at me because Roger Wilco kept getting zapped and shouting “JEsus CHRIST”
Yeah those Space Quest games were alright.
Love the uesername!
One of my favorite college memories was my friend and I getting a show on our college radio station and playing the Soylent Clear jingle from Space Quest 6 over the air as a message from our sponsors.
Don’t know why the video only uses images from Space Quest 3.
I’d have put some of the mario rpgs up here. They can legitimately funny. Superstar Saga still makes me laugh out loud to this day.
This is a pretty solid list, though Sam & Max Hit The Road, The Space Bar, and Day of the Tentacle are glaring omissions. I’m going to have to disagree on where this list places Kingdom O’ Magic. That game shouldn’t be in the top 10 best, but it deserves an honorable mention as one of the best. The gameplay is uninspired, but it has the highest humor to gameplay ratio of anything else on this list. It’s the Airplane of adventure games! By which I mean it’s wall to wall gags and the moment you think someone is being taken seriously it turns out to be a setup for the next piss-taking bit of comedy. Sure there are a lot of gags you’ll hate, but less than 30 seconds later you’ll be hit by a gag you love.
I’m going to have to disagree on where this list places Kingdom O’ Magic. That game shouldn’t be in the top 10 best, but it deserves an honorable mention as one of the best. It is listed as 4th Worst.
Yes, and it shouldn’t be there. Nor should it be in the top ten best. Hence my recommendation that it receive an honorable mention for it’s positive qualities.
I haven’t played the Futurama game, but I thought the cutscenes were funny.
My funniest game of all time is Sam and Max: The Devil’s Playhouse. It’s pretty surprising none of the Sam and Max games made the list, they are all hilarious.
I was surprised to not see “Day of the Tentacle.” There are some genuinely hilarious moments in that one; the one that sticks with me is the climax to the beauty pageant quest.
Another classic
It did at least get a mention in the Monkey Island 2 slide.
I love Devil’s Playhouse! Definitely the best of that crop of Telltale games.
I’m glad to see Untitled Goose Game on this list. That game is pure magic, a beautiful convergence of design in all of its aspects. I remember when it came out, reviewers would weirdly attempt to excuse the goose’s behavior by calling the townsfolk kind of assholes, maybe deserving to be terrorized by it. To those people, I say you are making a flaccid excuse from a place of moral equivocation. If you think the villagers deserve it, you do not understand the true meaning of this game.
I’m going to stand up for Matt Hazard, the execution wasn’t perfect , but the ideas were good , and Will Arnett’s (for its he of Arrested Development and Bojack Horseman fame ) delivery of a Duke Nukem style character in way way over his head is worth it. YMMV and really really liking meta/4th wall breaking gameplay probably helps .Also its not a first person shooter (despite the Duke3D references), its a third person cover shooter most of the time , akin to Gears of War.On the other hand…HHGTTG has a massive problem that very early in the game , forgetting to look for , and take an item with you leaves you unable to progress a lot later on . In the days before game patches this meant you were basically screwed and most likely needed to restart again from the beginning. That happened to me , and it was NOT funny, at least at the time.
It’s understandable that you’d feel that way about HHGTTG, but the catch
is that those old Infocom games were designed differently than how we
expect games to be played these days. In modern point-n-clicks, starting
with LucasArts basically, you can just start at the first puzzle and
continue to the last one without ever being permanently stuck, but the
Infocom text adventures are more like one big puzzle, or maybe a
metapuzzle. It was expected that you’d have to go back to earlier
saves/scenes or even start over entirely to try different things and
work out more optimal sequences of moves. That’s why it was possible to
string long sequences of commands together at one prompt, like
“>NORTH. TAKE LAMP. EAST. KILL TROLL” — so you could start over and
bypass big chunks of game you’d already solved, to quickly get back to
the point where you suspected you’d missed something. Truly beating the
game meant you’d compiled a full list of commands that you could type
into the first prompt and solve the entire game all at once.
This
was the main problem with graphical games like Space Quest that came
out before Lucasarts changed the paradigm to “you can never get stuck” —
they were basically designed like Infocom games, but didn’t have that
affordance of being able to dump a partial solve in and skip ahead, so
starting over when it turned out the last scene needed an item from the
first scene was infinitely more tedious.
y’all need to check out Charles Barkley Shut Up and Jam Gaiden
A masterpiece for sure.
I’ve never understood why anybody picks the sequel over the original when it comes to Monkey Island. I never thought the writing nor the humor was as sharp as it was the first time around.
I won’t complain about the absence of 2000 sixties spy-caper FPS “No One Lives Forever” from this list. I will just pity William for never having played it.
I’m going to throw a hat in the ring for Undertale which surprised me with how genuinely funny it was when I played it.
It probably doesn’t count as a “comedy game” so much as a “game based on a comedy” but Simpsons Hit & Run was surprisingly good.
Does the Leisure Suit Larry series fit on this list someplace?
Leisure Suit Larry fits in the end.*takes a small bow, exits stage right*
not the tip?
I’d give you a star, but kinja’s comment system is beyond broken today. You have my star in spirit.
I’d submit both Jazzpunk and Barkley Shut Up and Jam Gaiden, as well.