Video Games and Comedy

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.

• Part 1.Scaffolding and how to fall off it: Theories and concepts.-1. Ludo-Comedic Consonance: An Introduction to Video Games and Comedy.-2. Comedy and the Dual Position of the Player.-3. Press X to Punch(line): The Design and Cognition of Interactive Gags.-4. The Rubber Chicken’s Ergodicity: On Puzzle Punchlines in The Secret of Monkey Island.-5. On Nintendo’s Visual Humour: Slapstick Cinema and Comic Theatre in Super Smash Bros.-6. Benign Trials, Vexing Violations: Reading Humour in Puzzle Games.- Part 2.Clowning Around: Contexts, Cultures,and Communities.- 7. The Illuminatus Space Game: From an April Fools’ Joke to Digital Cultural Heritage.-8. Red Comrades Save the Galaxy: Early Russian Adventure Games and the Tradition of Anecdote.-9. “Sorry, You Had Won”: Satirical French Digital Games Responding to National Sociopolitical Crisis (1984–1986).-10. Making Fun of Tetris: Humour in Parodies of a Computer Game Classic.-11. Ridiculing the Player: Live-Action Visualisations of Game Experience in YouTube Parody Videos as an Ambivalent Strategy of Self-Fashioning.-12. Emergence and Ephemerality of Humour During Live Coverage of Large-Scale eSports Events.- Part 3. Five Ways to Spoil A Joke: Case Studies.- 13. Cybernetic Irony: Racial Humour from Mecha-Hitler to Nuclear Gandhi.-14. “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.-15. “A Tool of Efficiency and Consumption to Destroy Man”: Irony and Sincerity in Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes.-16. Humour in Pornographic Browser Games: From Undertale to Uddertale, a Case Study.-17. That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore (Or Is It?): On Hitman and Gamer Humour(lessness)