Make Me Laugh

The games on the Make Me Laugh list have two main qualities: They are funny and they also happen to have good gameplay. This list is also a work in progress. While most agree that Day of the Tentacle is one of the funniest games ever made, the truly subjective nature of humor rears its head when people start assembling such lists. Humor is also a pride point. Have you ever laughed at something when no one else did? It's easier to identify great games than it is to single out good games that also make us laugh.

The lighthearted humor of Animal Crossing fit in well with the rest of the game.

The decision was tough, as many games, like books or films, have humorous moments, but are not worthy of being called humorous achievements overall. A few such games deserve brief mention here. One is Nintendo's Animal Crossing, an RPG for the GameCube. GameSpot's Greg Kasavin writes, "The dialogue in the game is just terrific. The whole game has this lighthearted feel, where, even though it's not all laugh-out-loud funny, you always feel (or I always felt) on the verge of busting out laughing while playing."

The animal gods of Black & White offered plenty of comic relief.

Peter Molyneux's Black & White has humorous elements, too, although the game as a whole isn't a comedy. The cow, naturally shy, offered comic relief compared with the more-serious ape and tiger characters. Of course, improper tiger training could create humorous situations. The tiger might, for example, spend all his time eating children or stepping on villagers. The radio commentary in Grand Theft Auto III earns a nod as well. So do Earthworm Jim and Tales of Symphonia, both reasonable nominees with plenty of laughs embedded.

Dan Harnett says that 3D World Runner for the NES is one of the funniest games he's ever played. "What made it so funny was that there was no ending," he says. "None. Zero. Not even a whiff of an ending. Basically, you put on pair of those cheap 3D glasses with red and blue lenses and ran an indistinguishable little man around a rotating globe, jumping over canyons, mountains, and other static crap."

Parappa the Rappa on Playstation.

We also discovered through the process of identifying the picks of the funny litter that there are plenty of games that have unintentional humor, such as Resident Evil, with its stiff, B-movie dialogue. Sylvan Clebsch, who finds very few games truly funny, says that "the only lasting humorous impressions games make are postmortem--games that become famous long after their demise due to their unintentional humor ('All your base are belong to us')." "Recognizing the difference between a funny joke or witticism (which will become annoying) and lighthearted gameplay (which may not seem funny at first)," he says, is one of the most difficult aspects of infusing games with humor. He cites PaRappa the Rapper as an example. "The jokes aren't fiction-style gags," he says, "and the game becomes more amusing as you play it, rather than less. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how much of that was intentional."

It's the intentionally funny that are celebrated here. Not surprisingly, Tim Schafer and LucasArts are attached to many of these games.