Comedy in Games Should Be More Than Just Quips – Extra Punctuation

And I don’t think it’d be overstepping the mark to say that this is part of a rising antagonism from audiences towards the general use of quippy, light-hearted dialogue in mainstream video games and movies. As for me, I like comedy dialogue, I’m fully in favour of it. I wish these games actually fucking had any. For you see, quipping is not comedy. Games like Forspoken and Uncharted and Borderlands, as well as basically every superhero movie these days, are saturated in dialogue you could call quippy, possibly even facetious, but you couldn’t call it funny. Allow me to illustrate the difference.

“I object to all this sex on television. I mean, I keep falling off.” THAT’S funny dialogue. That’s comedy. That’s an actual joke. In contrast, saying “Oh great,” when something not great is going on, or saying “That just happened,” after something happens, is not comedy. It’s just a character being facetious. Sarcasm may have been upgraded to the second lowest form of wit after pop culture references but it’s still not very funny. And neither is talking too much, while we’re at it. Writers of games like Borderlands and Guardians of the Galaxy, lumped with the task of ensuring that characters constantly stream dialogue lest the drooling morons in the playerbase get distracted by passing butterflies, seem to be of the opinion that if you just keep uselessly talking then comedy will eventually occur, by the infinite monkeys principle, in direct opposition to the old orthodoxy that brevity is the soul of wit. So characters incessantly overclarify and bicker and make things awkward and then talk about the fact that they’ve just made things awkward.

Facetious dialogue is not jokes. Well, tell a lie, it’s one joke playing out over and over again: someone in a dangerous situation is talking like they are not in a dangerous situation. Expectations defied, guffaw guffaw, oh it is to laugh. But the usual effect of a character being sarcastic or facetiously oversharing in an otherwise po-faced setting is that that character comes across like an absolute smarmy ponce.

Speaking of absolute smarmy ponces, this specific mixture of sarcasm and facetiousness is often referred to as “Whedonesque” dialogue, named after – hang on a second while I get my ten foot bargepole out – Joss Whedon, who pioneered it in popular TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly before failing upwards into adding his fetid stink to movies like Marvel’s Avengers and Justice League, said the bitter internet humourist without a fraction of the man’s success. But I don’t think it’s fair to lay the ubiquity of quippy dialogue at one man’s feet. Joss Whedon wasn’t personally going to people’s houses with a broom, shoving them out the door and down the road to the cinema; the audience gets the media it deserves, and apparently something about Whedonesque writing appealed to a wide audience.

As for why, I’m no sociologist, so I can only speculate. The key element of Whedonesque writing is that characters come across as disaffected, so they can keep making smarmy quips while terrible shit’s going down, and perhaps as we neared the end of the twentieth century and a new generation became increasingly aware that the world they were inheriting was coming apart at the seams and there was bugger all they could do about it, there was a collective loss of hope and increase in cynicism that resonated well with disaffection. And maybe the tide’s now turning against it because in recent years we’re seeing exactly what happens when everyone stops giving a shit for too long: the world falls into the hands of the few people who do give a shit, which is to say, psychotics.

Personally, I never liked Buffy the Vampire Slayer dialogue and still don’t. For the two abovementioned reasons – because it isn’t fucking funny and it turns every character into a smarmy ponce. And if on top of being a smarmy ponce they’re also portrayed as extremely capable and without clear flaws, as is almost always the case in video games because gameplay demands the player continually succeed at the challenges presented, then they come across as even more intolerably smug. Bruce Campbell in Army of Darkness gets away with being facetious and overconfident because he also constantly fucks up, you’re supposed to think he’s an idiot. And that’s why Forspoken’s main character is obnoxious even though they ripped off the entire fucking plot of Army of Darkness.

But my stance that having characters constantly being facetious is a poor substitute for actual sodding jokes was tested recently when I gave a somewhat positive review to High on Life, the comedic first person shooter helmed by – oh blimey my ten foot bargepole is getting a lot of use today – Justin Roiland, creator of Rick and Morty. Which certainly is a game where characters talk too much, and I think a lot of people were expecting me to take it to task for that, but I actually did find it funny, sorry. Even though, on the surface, it’s doing everything I’ve just been railing against. Characters just talk constantly and facetiously instead of delivering actual jokes.

So why does it work for me? Well, on one level at least, the jabbering in High on Life doesn’t make the characters feel smarmy because I don’t think we’re supposed to think that they’re competent or dry cool badasses. Most of it is weirdos talking out of a lack of social awareness or anxious desire to fill silence, and more importantly it’s not really quippy. It doesn’t come across as trying too hard to sound clever. In something like Borderlands all the dialogue is quippy and tryhard. You blow a dude up and someone goes “Looks like somebody’s got a case of the Mondays, quippety quip quip cue card quip!” Meanwhile, you blow someone up on High on Life and your gun goes. “Oh fuck yeah we blew them up. Did you see that? That was fucking sweet.”

It’s the more naturalistic approach that appeals, I suppose. There’s no joke in the line in itself, but it’s funny because it adds a punctuation mark to the already amusing spectacle of blowing up a dude. See, when you’re shooting for straight “comedy game,” then ideally the comedy should infuse everything, not just the dialogue. The story should be absurd and the characters should look funny and blowing them up should send their ragdolls sailing through the air like Team Rocket blasting off again. And when that happens, a smug overwritten quip is more likely to deflate the comedy energy than anything, especially if you’ve heard it three times already this fight scene alone.

In brief: There’s something about the combination of elaborate high-concept sci-fi, explosive violence and fourth wall breaking naturalistic dialogue between flawed characters that works for me. And there it is, there’s the problem: it works FOR ME. The risk of comedy is that it’s inherently subjective, which limits its audience.

You can try to be as broadly funny as possible with slapstick and knob gags, or you can work your balls off to supply a neverending stream of finely crafted wit, like the Portal games, but if you’re anywhere between those two extremes, your humour is probably going to gel with some people but bounce right off of others. I think High on Life and Saints Row 4 are funny comedies, and I’ve been disagreed with on that. I think Sunset Overdrive’s attempt at comedy was about as appealing as biting down upon the side of a broken wine glass, and I’ve been disagreed with on that, as well.

The fact that High on Life is shooting to be a straight comedy game rather than just another generic game with facetious dialogue makes it something to be celebrated, if you ask me. These days the profit-obsessed uber-mainstream media like theatrical movies and triple-A video games rarely shoot for the comedy standards of, say, The Naked Gun or Monty Python movies, which were constant streams of beautifully crafted gags, because the subjectivity of comedy means they can’t appeal to a broad enough audience. Plus, more importantly, comedy is hard, and requires mastery, and it’s a lot easier and cheaper to just go through the script adding sarcasm quotes to every other line.

So these days you only see comedy in the cinema when superheroes quip at each other because it’s just another ingredient thrown into the schizophrenic morass of the modern blockbuster. ‘Cos we can never have too many fucking action adventure comedies, can we, where the action can’t be too violent and the adventure can’t be too exotic and the comedy can’t be too funny. Everyone can only have plain oatmeal now because some people don’t like the apple cinnamon kind. Well I like the apple cinnamon kind. Especially when it’s hot enough to cause first degree burns and being introduced carelessly to Joss Whedon’s underpants.