Timing is incredibly important to jokes, but comedy is so much more than just jokes. I think that that’s something that when you’re working in a medium like video games that you cant control what everyone’s doing, moment to moment, beat by beat. It is going to be hard to have a joke land at exactly that right moment but when you can draw on the idea of a character and what that character’s going through, it’s possible for anything that they say or do or the way that they act in a situation in one moment that’s not dependent on pauses and timing to be funny. The biggest mistake I think people make when coming up with their characters is not giving them enough weaknesses, and particularly in a video game model, where for some reason we think that we want all of these characters to be so heroic and amazing and perfect at what they do because they’re ya know, the best shot at something, and they were the hero of their, ya know… training class or whatever it was. Characters are going to be so much more inherently funny or inherently tragic, it doesn’t really matter where you land on that spectrum for the tone of your game if they have weaknesses. Because ultimately the weaknesses, if those overwhelm the character are ultimately gonna make it a tragedy, and if the character’s able to overcome those weaknesses and able to face a lot of those things that get in their way, there’s gonna be a lot of comedy there. You only get comedy of a person isn’t perfect, if a person who has flaws doesn’t know how to respond a situation is incapable of dealing with something, there is something that will be so inherently funny about those situations if you’ve developed that character right and put them up against the right foil. So that kind of humor I think is something that absolutely lends itself very well to games but what you need to do is establish those kind of things about your character and establish what they do well and what they really don’t do well. Because when a character is their own worst enemy you have the basic foundation for something really comedic right there, and then it’s just about how you play that out, how you show it through the things, through the obstacles that you put in their way, through the ways that they deal with them and go around them, and that’s something that game design is actually pretty darn good at doing, so I think that there’s a way that we, as an industry, can amp up the comedy if we look at it from that perspective.
