Challenge: comedy

[Tomas HVM]

I've succeeded with the design of a funny RPG once. And once I managed to make a comedy out of a game that was not meant to be funny.

However; I have failed disastrous several times, not only to write funny games, but also to make funny game sessions. My latest failure as a GM in this respect, was with such a funny game as TOON.

I'm a bit stubborn about my writing skill, and my abilities as a GM. I want to improve myself, and one way to do it is to make myself master what I'm weak at. I'm weak at comedy, so this is my challenge:

I want to be funny!!!
(in a roleplaying game, preferrably)

I want to be able to pinpoint the elements necessary to make a game of comedy, and to make any player group into a hilarious gathering of verbal slapstickmen, or stand-up roleplayers. Any kind of comedy or funny-bones will do.

Do you have any laughable advice to offer?
Any lofty theories on hilariousness?
Any silly thoughts?

[M. J. Young]

There's an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which Data is trying to learn to be funny. He sets up a holodeck simulation of a comedy club, including a comedian played by Joe Piscopo (supposed to be a representation of a real twenty-second century comic). Toward the end he (the android), Piscopo (a computer-generated hologram), and Guinan (an alien) have a conversation about what makes things funny.

I thought that one of the funniest moments in Star Trek. How could any one of these characters have a clue what makes humans laugh?

Most people don't get it, though.

Everyone has the potential to be funny. Not everyone can be Bill Cosby or Robin Williams funny. In fact, Bill Cosby and Robin Williams can't be each other. Each is funny in his own way, and each appeals to different people. I always enjoyed Williams' standup until the recent video, which I found excessively vulgar to the point of being difficult to watch--but it apparently appealed to a lot of people.

I'm not sure whether you can be funny to other people by trying to figure out what is funny to other people. I think you have to focus on what is funny to you, and hope that the people with whom you interact will also find that funny.

Then again, I've never attempted to run a comedy game, even if there have been some uproarious moments in some of our play.

--M. J. Young

[clehrich]

I'm certainly no expert on being funny, although I can occasionally raise a dry chuckle in the classroom.  The only thing I can recommend specifically, in terms of RPG's, is to think very hard about the TV show "Seinfeld," and also watch as much of "Late Night With Conan O'Brien" as possible.

Before I get a lot of screaming, stop a second.  I'm not saying these are the funniest things around, by any means.  I do find them funny, but neither is really all that high on my list of screamingly hilarious or anything.  BUT --- they do some things you can actually steal.

1. Self-referential humor is funny if you have loyal fans, which is to say fans who watch the show religiously and thus remember a huge history of past jokes and events.  

For example, some years back on Letterman, he had Indigo Girls on, and he asked (in an obvious attempt at a joke line), "Now, is that Indigo Girls, or the Indigo Girls?"  They stared at him in a vaguely hostile way, and the whole thing fell flat.  The next night, Letterman made the same joke, about the same band, and delivered it in such a way that the whole point was that the joke sucked.  And he did this night after night, laughing masochistically.  You konw, "Hey, Paul -- is that Paul Shaefer or THE Paul Shaefer?"  And you know what?  After a week, people thought it was hysterical.  

Conan O'Brien is a genius at this form of humor; he can raise a laugh out of a weak joke within seconds just by remarking on how un-funny he is, what a loser he is, and how the Society of Bedwetters is going to drag him away.  This is how he gets away with the most bizarre things, like the Woossy Wagon or Triumph, The Insult Comic Dog.  They suck, but that's the point, and they so obviously know they suck, and it's so obvious that Conan knows they suck and doesn't have any better material, except he does have better material and in a sense this is the better material, because actually what's funny is that it sucks which is why it's hysterical, blah blah.  If you can find the tape, there's an old episode when Conan and Andy Richter did a Led Zeppelin "Song Remains the Same" thing, with Conan dressed up as Robert Plant -- bare chest and all -- desperately trying to scream "Dazed and Confused" in falsetto.  If you ever see this, you will suddenly get what I'm talking about better than I could possibly explain.

You can steal this in RPG's, because by definition you have a pack of loyal fans.  They remember everything, and what doesn't work once will become funny over time.

2. A related point comes from "Seinfeld", in the sense that the show did it unusually overtly and well.  The point: in-jokes are funny to the in-crowd.  So you want to hit odd remarks, lines, terms, and phrases of this particular narrow game community, often.  This works best when one of the following things is true:

[*]You made the joke, and it was great
[*]Someone else made the joke, and it was great
[*]You made the joke, and it sucked very hard[/list:u]In other words, don't do this if the joke was mediocre or just okay, or if someone else sucked.

3. Following from both these points, the great trick I think is to convince the group that they are the ones actually being funny, and that they are also the clever, hip, in-crowd -- which will also convince them that they are funny, oddly enough.  And even more oddly, a small, tightly-knit group of people who find themselves, as a group, hysterically funny, IS funny -- provided you're in that group, of course.

Don't bother watching a whole lot of brilliant stand-up unless you have a hell of a lot of charisma and even more energy.  And don't steal others' material, either, because if you're caught at it you will suck suck suck.  I recommend that you make yourself a bit of a prat, and float lots of "possibles," gags that just might work; if the gags fall flat, be a prat, and then repeat the gag next session -- or this session, if you get a great opportunity -- and then keep doing it until it becomes the funniest in-joke around.

If someone else does or says something hysterical, especially at your expense, mug a bit.  Be very willing to laugh about what a prat you are.

One last suggestion.  If a player does something hilarious, give that player a piece of candy.  I mean it.  Make a little presentation number out of it.  Then also tweak the game situation to make that player, just for a moment, the center of attention in a gameplay sense.  This basically says to everyone, "If you are funny, you will be rewarded in- and out-of-game.  Be funny."  Then you don't have to carry all the load.

[pete_darby]

Okay, this is going into Keith Johnstones Impro, which is my comfort blanket these days... I'm presuming you want spontaneous funny, rather than prescripted funny here.

Johnstone's ideas about what stop folk being spontaneous breaks down, in my interpretation, into two fears. Fear of being weird, and fear of being dull. We've had a presumption that being spontaneous is hard, partly because we want to fell that what we say won't make us look odd, but at the same time be interesting enough to be worth listening to.

So if you worry about these things, you're caught in a mental catch 22 of pre-auditing, which kills off spontenaiety.

Now, this is all well and good, but how could you design a game which encourages this?

First step is to put in advice about setting the group up to be accepting of the contributions everyone makes. Make sure everyone knows that you're in a safe place where everyone is allowed to be odd, or even strangely normal, or to be able to say "I'm not saying that!" (which is quite different, mentally, from going into a state of denial about what you've thought of saying: you've acknowledged that you've thought of something you think the group would find unacceptable, or that you find unacceptable).

Secondly, see if you can put into place a tangible reward system for making folks laugh. Toon hands out XP for coming up with stuff that makes the GM laugh, or makes everyone stop in their tracks muttering "what the..."

Thirdly, take a position like Letterman or Conan as GM... demonstrate that poor, groan inducing jokes are, in their own way, as acceptable as Wildean wit or Shavian repartee. Demonstrate that you can still have fun as the butt of jokes as well as the teller. Releive the pressure to perfom, in so much as you can, and the social reinforcement of the humour will take over. Show that it's not a competition to be clever, or more tactically humourous, or being able to say the right thing at the right time, but just of saying whatever you feel like saying. Couple that with easy going reinforcement when folk actually laugh, and it shoudl get easier.

[Mike Holmes]

I've said it before. Some people can't be funny on demand, even if funny at other times. In fact, I'd say that a large portion of the population is this way. And even if it's 50%, the idea of having a game in which you tell people, "Be funny.....now!" just isn'g going to fly.

I played several games of Toon, and they all blew chunks. Toon is a bad game. It rewards players for being funny. Well, since that's the point of the game, do you really need to reward people? I mean, they'd be trying anyhow. Doesn't matter however, because most people just can't do it. Period.

What does work is structure providing situations in which players can find funny things to have their characters do. This is why Paranioa and InSpectres are both hilarious every time you play them. They don't just expect players to suddenly become funny when it's their scene. Instead, the players just play their characters as they would in any other RPG. The situations are set up such that, even if they don't play to the situation, it's still funny. And if they do play to the situation, even a little, it's hysterically funny.

So, I'm playing Paranoia last Saturday as it happens, and in typical fashion, Ryan's character has managed to get the R&D Jetpack. He, of course, tests it out being a newb to Paranioa. As he's rocketing towards the cieling at ridiculous speeds, he says, "I'll use my, uh, dodge skill to try to miss the cieling."

Laughed my ass off.

R&D Jetpack + Troubleshooter = funny

Garunteed.

In general, if you want a game to be funny, have players incentivized to play their characters in a straighforward fashion in situations in which straightforward is funny. The whole point of Paranioa is the irony of trying to live an everyday modern life while simultaneously combating the supernatural at work. There's nothing funnier than the juxtaposition of a character answering his cell phone while in the grasp of a giant tentacled being. Any player can deliver, "Uh, Hello? Can I get back to you?" in this situation in a manner that'll have you laughing hard enough that your sides will hurt.

Hol is so funny, you don't even have to play. In fact, it's probably harder to have fun playing it than reading it. The trap of overdoing it.

Mike

[xiombarg]

Man, am I the only person who has had good experiences running Toon?

I used to run Toon all through college. My games were infamous. People who normally didn't game went out of their way to attend when I had time to run it.

What did I do? Well, Chris nailed part of it. I knew my audience. A lot of my jokes were in-jokes. We were all going to the same college, Grinnell College, so the games were always set in a parody of our college, "Grimhell Looniversity". Also, over time, I built up jokes and ideas from previous games, and people who remembered those jokes found them hilarious -- and, thanks to the social power of laughter, so did the people who hadn't been there previously, especially since the other players, not me, did the lame job of explaining it if it was needed. But it rarely was.

The main thing was energy, tho. For the gonzo from of humor that Toon requires, you need a ton of energy, and that's why I didn't run it all the time, despite demand. I could only run it when I was in a manic mood, when I was 100% well-rested and in a delerious mood. A rare event in college, and even rarer now. ;-D

I'd stand on the table. I mean stand up on it, in the middle of the table. I jumped around, I acted stuff out, I screamed. I'd describe what was happening, and then I'd point at a player. "What are you doing?"

I'd give them a couple seconds to respond. If they were flailing or unfunny, I'd say: "You're bogged" and move on to the next person, rapid fire. When someone did something funny, I'd roll with it, encourage it, and take the joke as far as it could go, all the while flipping from player to player, giving them an opportunity to react and then moving on. My own jokes fed on the jokes of the player, and vice-versa -- we wrote for each other, and this also created the sort of in-jokes Chris talks about on the fly, without even having to have the self-depeciating feel to it, tho being completely NOT self-conconcious helped. It didn't take weeks, it took minutes.

The manic energy and skipping around, saying people are boggled... That's all part of the standard advice, in the rulebook, for running Toon. Toon is "vanilla funny" in the sense of "vanilla Narrativist" -- the system sets up some generally funny stuff, and then it gets out of the way rather than actually encouraging it. But the advice is there, and it can be done using Toon.

Toon isn't funny every time -- you need the energy to actually implement its techniques. Neither is Inspectres, actually -- the majority of the games of it I ran were funny, but sometimes a player doesn't "get it", and it comes screeching to a halt. Like horror, humor is a mood that is very easy to snap out of if you're not careful.

[ethan_greer]

I take my funny pretty seriously.

I think anyone can learn to be funny given some time and effort. At least, speaking from my own personal experience. I wasn't funny when I was younger, so I decided to become funny. I've been fairly successful. Here are some things I did.

1. Figure out what you think is funny.  M.J. is right on the money with that one.

2. Learn timing. When you come up with something funny to say, don't blurt it right out (unless doing so would make it funnier). Wait for the appropriate time, and then release it like letting a bird fly from your open palm.  You'll learn to pick out the right moment easier with practice. And if you miss an opportunity, don't force it - save the idea/line/joke for another time. Soon you'll have a backlog of funny things that you can draw on.

3. Develop your own idiom. I think that's actually what Chris is talking about - It's not just that cutting on oneself is inherrantly funny, more that Letterman and O'Brien pull it off so well because that's their thing. Personally, I go for the deadpan delivery of the ridiculous about half the time, with the other half of the time being smirking wisecracks. And bad puns. I'm noted for them. Find your own voice. Paying attention to item 1 above will help with this.

4. Turn off the funny occasionally. Learn how to tell when to serious things up. Too much of a good thing and all that.

5. Common tools for funny - when all else fails, you can usually get at least a mild smile from one of the following. I've included some poster children for each, too: Slapstick (Three Stooges, Jim Carrey). Self-deprecation (Letterman). Sarcasm (Dennis Miller, Dorothy Parker). Deadpan delivery of outrageous remarks (Monty Python, Stephen Wright). Hyperbole (Douglas Adams). Genitals (Everyone).

On the road to becoming funny, you are going to screw up bad sometimes and even make people angry. It's all part of the learning process, so learn from your failures and move on. Making people laugh is very gratifying, and learning to do it is worthwhile. The world needs all the funny it can get.

So, once you've learned to be funny, it should be a simple matter to apply this knowledge to playing your NPCs and the situations you present and/or encourage.

In the meantime, and perhaps more to the topic at hand, i.e. being funny in roleplaying: Listen to Mike. As usual, he's making a lot of sense. Find a game that in and of itself generates the funny for you, and ride that wave.

In addition to the games he mentioned, try Elfs, Donjon, or Kobolds Ate My Baby!

Xiombarg: No, you're not the only one.  I too have had good experiences with Toon. But I think you yourself have pointed out the "flaw" in the game: The GM has to be funny. If the GM isn't funny, Toon is going to suck.

[xiombarg]

Xiombarg: No, you're not the only one.  I too have had good experiences with Toon. But I think you yourself have pointed out the "flaw" in the game: The GM has to be funny. If the GM isn't funny, Toon is going to suck.

Well, I'll buy that one. Or at the very least, the GM has to know what's funny, when to "buzz" someone and go to the next person.

[Tomas HVM]

Thanks guys. for the advice. As expected it pointed in several directions, so I'll ponder on:

Seems to me there are several ways a game could be made funny. Your comments on Toon and Paranoia, both games I have played, goes a long way to show that these games have different basics.

In TOON the players have to be funny, to make the game function (that's my attemt at an "analysis" so far). I do not agree with the notion that it's the GM who has to be funny. The games I have GMed have functioned badly, but have absolutely been best when the players were left to work out ways of being hilarious by themselves. I've just not been helpful in the right way. I believe the GM need to be helpful in TOON, in a way which makes the players trust that they may do anything, and safely make great FOOLS of themselves. TOON is a kind of comedy where funny has to be in every character, to make it lift into slapstick heaven. The advice about choosing a known setting, making the game into a parody of it, seems very sound to me (the Grimhell Looniversity). I'll try that out later today, when I'm GMing the game again (I know the school all my players go to, and both the headmaster and school-inspector will be great villains). I'll try to be very energetic in my GM-style too. I am not usually very shouty and jumpy, but I think I can be (and believe it will have an effect on my players, having played with me for years). Report will follow!

In PARANOIA there is another kind of funny, correctly observed to be more situational. The contrast between normally thinking and acting characters, and the absurdly terrorizing and claustrophobic setting, makes it all grow into a symphony of hilarious surrealism. I like it, and have seen GMs doing it in a greaqt way. The best of them served their descriptions in a very dry and "factual" way, that made the happenings of the game even more funny. "Dry witty" is the term, I think, for how a GM should act in Paranoia. Or perhaps only "dry". And I agree with those of you who have observed that it is easier to be a funny player in Paranoia, than in TOON.

Are there other types of comedy too, to be used in games? And how do they function? What are their strong sides, and weak?

Are there types of comedy that never will function in a game? What about stand-up; is it possible to make a game of stand-up comedy in some way?

[iambenlehman]

I'd like to throw out one of my favorite comedy games -- Teenagers from Outer Space.

The game, I think, is sort of a comprimise between the two "types" evaluated here -- it can concentrate on slapstick humor, but it also has a familiar setting (high school) to fall back on that is also funny in and of itself.  To clarify -- you can (and, in my experience, often do) go off on extended slapstick routines, comedy monologues, or any of the other traditional "funny stuff" that you see in normal comedy sources.  However, when you aren't doing that, you have the humor of, well, high school to fall back on.

I really think that this is the best of both worlds.  The settings of Paranoia and InSpectres are, well, heavier than TFOS.  They discourage going off on extended unrelated riffs (InSpectres because you have a mission to complete, Paranoia because the setting will kill you if you don't interface with it at all times.)  But, at the same time, it doesn't lead to the dead air that Toon has, because when you can't produce teh funny, the setting can produce it for you.  Hey, c'mon:  High school is inherently funny, high school with aliens is inherently funnier.

I think that there is a distinct lesson to be learned here, as far as setting for comedy games -- make your setting funny, but don't make it overbearingly funny that the players can't make their own jokes.

I don't mean to sing the praises of TFOS without flaws.  It has a lot of problems, two of which I can easily identify:

1) Core System.  In some poor attempt at universality, the core system of TFOS is taken out of the Cyberpunk RPG.  This, to put it blankly, sucks.  It gives the whole thing a strong tendency to drift Simulationist, at which point you are approximating funny, rather than producing it, and play becomes mechanical.
2) Plot Drift.  Much like its source material (Japanese Animated High School Comedies) it has a tendency to drift, plotwise, into soap opera or high adventure stories with occaisional in-jokes, rather than outright humor.  This isn't necessarily a problem but it can be resolved by a blatant disregard for continuity and a refusal to respect either the PCs or the antagonists.  The GM section has some good advice about this, especially in regards to sex, but the problem, ultimately, is not resolved systematically.

yrs--
--Ben

[xiombarg]

In TOON the players have to be funny, to make the game function (that's my attemt at an "analysis" so far). I do not agree with the notion that it's the GM who has to be funny.

I'll buy this is well. In fact, to make this more generic, but still in the spirit of Ethan's comment, I think that in order for Toon to work, someone has to find someone else in the group to be funny, and then the social aspects of laughter take over. It's notable that the times where my techniques for Toon failed were at cons -- though it sometimes worked. At a con, it was more of a crap-shoot whether the players would find myself -- or one of the others -- funny.

In fact, I would extend this to InSpectres and Paranoia as well. Someone has to find someone else in the group funny, or perhaps more accurate something that's going on funny. The reason people have some success with these games and not with Toon isn't because Toon is a bad game, but because like any good game, it encourages and rewards a certain kind of behavior, which happens to be funny -- if you find the basic idea funny. That's the thing -- if you don't think that ordinary people contrasting with the supernatural is funny, InSpectres isn't going to work. The time InSpectres fizzled for me was when none of the players "got it", and they didn't find each other or me funny for other reasons. (Not there was much I could do -- unlike Toon, there is so little GM influence on how a game of InSpectres works that it's tough for a funny GM to really shine there, if you asked me. You need funny players, or, as I said, at least one -- or people have to find the basic idea to be funny.)

All of that said, don't underestimate the value of a shill. Though I haven't tried it, given the way laugh tracks work in sitcoms, I'm pretty sure this might work: IF you've got that friend that thinks almost everything is funny, or always thinks a particular thing is funny, make sure he plays in the game. His laughter will encourage others, even if it's only to laugh at (rather than laugh with) that guy who always thinks fart jokes are funny.

[Mike Holmes]

I don't think any of us are disagreeing here.

It was pricisely my point that Toon doesn't work if the players aren't funny. What I'm saying is that System Does Matter. Bascially, Toon is no more funny than MERP - it relies entirely on the players to be funny. Wheras in Paranoia, any play tends to be funny, because it's well designed to produce that reliably.

I mean, if it takes those rare circumstances to run Toon well, and it still fails sometimes, then it's not very robust in producing funny, is it?

BTW, TFOS is somewhat in between. The system actually detracts from it being funny, IMO, because it encourages actor stance. Where TFOS is funny, is where the players engage the situation and make their characters funny. Playing TFOS deadpan, as one does in Paranioa would produce no funny. And, in fact, in about half the games I've played (including a playtest of the new edition with the designer about two years ago) it's been pretty dull. The big problem is that instead of relying on the situation like Paranioa does, it suggests "adventures" that run rather like dungeon crawls. Now that I think of it, in that playtest, we were shrunk down to tiny size to go into a sand castle, which did end up turning into a dungeon crawl, complete with map. Yes, when the players played to their characters, and the absurdity of it all, it worked. When thinking at all about the "adventure" it was just "go to door, open door, defeat monster, get treasure".

Gah.

Mike

[Tomas HVM]

I agree with Kirk Darkmyer and Mike Holmes: in TOON someone has to make funny stuff, twist the happenings, make a unbearable face, make a great joke, or just tackle everything with the same exceedingly dull mask.

However; to say that TOON is as funny as Middle Earth Roleplaying, is to far fetched for me. TOON clearly makes an effort to help the players make it funny. The drawings are funny. The shtichs are funny. All the small tidbits of the game are funny. And it's all very SILLY, which goes a long way in supporting an atmosphere in which the players dare to climb out on a limb and make a fool of themselves.

I had a game of TOON again today, playing with six young girls, making the setting a school with predatory teachers and small, cute herbivores as students. It came off quite well. The girls was enthusiastic about it.

However; I do agree with those who say that this game has some weaknesses. I think the genre is not a weakness, just a challenge. The game has flaws aside of the genre it represents. The system is weak. The writings of the game are variable in quality. I could list more of the flaws, but have to break off now.

I'm still interested in other comedy-genres though, so keep on posting them here, if there is more of them...

[Praetor Judis]

I can't speak to the inherent humor quality or quantity of a gaming system, but I find humor to be essential to my gaming experiences.  I work to keep the tone of my game intense, compelling, and at least once a plot arc, brutally uncomfortable (which is a stance to be discussed in another thread, I expect).  Because of this, I typically add a character to the party who's primary goal is to provide those moments of levity that are so important to a dramatic narrative.  I find the surest way to design a humerus character is to make him incongruous in some obvious way.  My best example to date was a character form my last campaign.

Ben Zameel was a fire mage that belonged to a powerful, but benign, secret society.  The society was decreed illegal by the ruling race on the continent, so they could not announce themselves publicly.  The party, of course, was aware of this society, as one of the players also belonged to it.  Through that character's contacts higher up in the society, they managed to learn that Ben Zameel was assumed to be high up in the order.

Now here's the hook:  Ben Zameel, to all appearances, was a paranoid schizophrenic who published cheap literature about a secret society that was controlling the population.  The character's position within society, contrasted with his supposed outlook, led to many moment of hilarity.  The best part was that once I set it in motion, the players kept it going.  Once they intuited Ben Zameel's role (which they did very quickly) they would ask him for input on events when they felt the need for a humor break.

I hope that helps...

[Pagrin]

Funny is a lot like beauty - in the eye of the beholder.
But it is easier to list what is not funny and try to avoid it.
Any humor which is explained after the fact is a bad joke.

Anything which offends the people to are joking toward is a bad joke.

Tone and pacing is very important, or you will become the joke.

Anything is funny as long as you present it the right way to people.

And lastly
Mel Brooks said it best - when I cut my finger its tragedy, when fall down the stairs and die, its comedy.
IE; When it happens to someone else its funny.
Pagrin :-)