Video Games and Comedy

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xx

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2. Ludo-Comedic Consonance: An Introduction to Video Games and Comedy

   • Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone, Tomasz Z. Majkowski, Jaroslav Švelch

   Pages 1-31

3. Scaffolding and How to Fall Off It: Theories and Concepts

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 33-33

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   2. Comedy and the Dual Position of the Player

      • Nele Van de Mosselaer

      Pages 35-52

   3. Press X to Punch(line): The Design and Cognition of Interactive Gags

      • Dooley Murphy

      Pages 53-70

   4. The Rubber Chicken’s Ergodicity: On Puzzle Punchlines in The Secret of Monkey Island

      • Daniel Heßler

      Pages 71-91

   5. On Nintendo’s Visual Humour: Slapstick Cinema and Comic Theatre in Super Smash Bros

      • Manuel Garin

      Pages 93-112

   6. Benign Trials, Vexing Violations: Reading Humour in Puzzle Games

      • Wyatt Moss-Wellington, Paul Martin

      Pages 113-130

4. Clowning Around: Contexts, Cultures, and Communities

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 131-131

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   2. The Illuminatus Space Game: From an April Fools’ Joke to Digital Cultural Heritage

      • Petri Saarikoski, Antti Lindfors, Jaakko Suominen, Markku Reunanen

      Pages 133-151

   3. Red Comrades Save the Galaxy: Early Russian Adventure Games and the Tradition of Anecdote

      • Alesha Serada

      Pages 153-172

   4. “Sorry, You Had Won”: Satirical French Digital Games Responding to National Sociopolitical Crisis (1984–1986)

      • Filip Jankowski

      Pages 173-190

   5. Making Fun of Tetris: Humour in Parodies of a Computer Game Classic

      • Sebastian Möring

      Pages 191-213

   6. Ridiculing the Player: Live-Action Visualisations of Game Experience in YouTube Parody Videos as an Ambivalent Strategy of Self-Fashioning

      • Agata Zarzycka

      Pages 215-232

   7. Emergence and Ephemerality of Humour During Live Coverage of Large-Scale eSports Events

      • Mateusz Felczak

      Pages 233-250Open Access

5. Five Ways to Spoil a Joke: Case Studies

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 251-251

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   2. Cybernetic Irony: Racial Humour from Mecha-Hitler to Nuclear Gandhi

      • Darshana Jayemanne, Cameron Kunzelman

      Pages 253-270

   3. “Mark Matthews Stars in ‘Anatomy is Hard!’ A Struggling Student Tries to Make the Grade with His Professor”: Sexual Humour and Queer Space in Coming Out on Top

      • Samuel Poirier-Poulin

      Pages 271-288

   4. “A Tool of Efficiency and Consumption to Destroy Man”: Irony and Sincerity in Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes

      • Rory K. Summerley

      Pages 289-305

   5. Humour in Pornographic Browser Games: From Undertale to Uddertale, a Case Study

      • Caroline Bem

      Pages 307-324

Video Games and Comedy is the first edited volume to explore the intersections between comedy and video games. This pioneering book collects chapters from a diverse group of scholars, covering a wide range of approaches and examining the relationship between video games, humour, and comedy from many different angles. The first section of the book includes chapters that engage with theories of comedy and humour, adapting them to the specifics of the video game medium. The second section explores humour in the contexts, cultures, and communities that give rise to and spring up around video games, focusing on phenomena such as in-jokes, player self-reflexivity, and player/fan creativity. The third section offers case studies of individual games or game series, exploring the use of irony as well as sexual and racial humour in video games.

• Comedy
• Digital Games
• Video Games
• Theory of Comedy
• Play
• Games Studies
• Humour

• University of Malta, Msida, Malta

  Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone

• Faculty of Polish Studies, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland

  Tomasz Z. Majkowski

• Department of Media Studies, Charles University, Prague, Czechia

  Jaroslav Švelch

Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone is Visiting Senior Lecturer at the University of Malta, and a Research Fellow with the University of Kent, UK. She has written extensively on comedy, including comedy in video games. 

Tomasz Z. Majkowski is Associate Professor at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, where he teaches and researches games, the carnivalesque and popular culture among other areas. 

Jaroslav Švelch is Assistant Professor of media studies at Charles University, Prague, the Czech Republic. A media scholar and linguist by training, his research focuses on game history, humour in video games, and video game monsters. He is the author of Gaming the Iron Curtain (2018), a history of computer gaming in 1980s Czechoslovakia.