Richard's Online Journal
Comedy 101: Cruel Intentions
Our hero, ladies and gentlemen...
One of the amazing things about so many comedy games out there is how much — more than almost any other medium, short of Christmas crackers — they ignore the most basic rules. Most recently, the one that comes to mind is the Runaway 2 demo, downloadable over here.
I haven’t played the full game, but this is a pretty lousy demo. The puzzle in it is ridiculous, involving turning a moose head into part of a bear costume, despite the result looking absolutely nothing whatsoever like a bear, and the goal completely unconnected to the story. Really, its main result is to make its main character, Brian, come across as nothing less than a complete dick. Not ideal marketing, really.
And then comes the scene where you get a guy raped by a polar bear. Brr.
Okay, the ‘rape’ bit is inferred rather than shown — we’ll get to the details a bit later on. The problem isn’t so much the bad taste, so much as the fact that it’s the demo’s one big comedy set-piece, and it’s one that doesn’t show the slightest understanding of how to either set up, or tell, a basic physical joke. And that’s a problem when trying to make a sale on the full game, because if the player doesn’t laugh, any hope of selling it as a humourous game goes down the toilet.
Flushed With Success
Clearly, nothing makes comedy funnier than over-analysing it, so to explain exactly why this gag falls so flat, let’s head all the way back to an older game — Monkey Island 2. One of the most memorable jokes in the game is when you, amiable pirate Guybrush Threepwood, stick a bucket of mud over someone’s door. Yes, that old routine. They open it, the mud falls, comedy happens. Much like the polar bear rape gag, it’s a slapstick routine at heart — albeit one that can safely be shown on screen instead of relayed via another character’s facial expressions and Treguard esque cries of ‘Ooh, nasty!’.
In theory, the difference between them should simply be one of scale — and even then, in this era of gross-out humour, eh, whatever. The Simpsons already did it after all, in the episode Homer Vs. Dignity (albeit with a panda, and far greater shame to the writer because dammit, the Simpsons should be better than that. And the last ten seasons. But that’s a whole other rant…)
Of course, it’s not that simple.
Only When The Sap’s Got Dignity
The reason that Monkey Island’s bit is actually funny is threefold. First, there’s no moral issue at all. It’s a bucket of mud, nothing more. Embarassing perhaps, but ultimately harmless. Secondly, and most importantly, the guy you’re doing it to is a complete asshole. His name is Largo LaGrande, scourge of dingy Scabb Island, and every time you’ve seen him up until that point has been to reinforce what a bad guy he is. He threatens the locals, he stamps around like he owns the place, and in the very first interactive scene, hangs the main character off a bridge and steals all his money. Anything you do to this guy is going to fall under ‘payback’.
Thirdly, related to that, he has a tremendous amount of authority and dignity to be stripped away for comic purposes. A classmate sitting on a whoopee cushion gets a snigger; the teacher doing it sends the class into fits. A clown pieing a random audience member in the face gets a very different reaction to the one who pies a heckler, or the upper-class gentleman sniffing at the circus antics.
“Wherever you go, on sea or on sand.
You can’t ever hide. From Largo LaGrande!
Let’s compare and contrast. Does the character in Runaway ‘deserve’ his hot bear loving? Not in any universe. In the first instance, it’s hard to make rape funny — and while the action takes place off-screen, the main character’s face leaves little question as to what’s happening. Secondly, he’s an amiable enough guy, trying to ingratiate himself with a group of bears. That’s the set-up to the big gag — he’s very much ‘accepted’. Unfortunately, it’s a gag that gets drowned out by the main character’s cruelty in ensuring that specific result — not merely switching his bottle of pheremones from ‘ferocious bear’ to ‘female bear in heat’, but advising him to go out on all fours to specifically encourage that kind of reaction. Authority? He has none. He’s a helpful guy, a misguided bear-geek, set upon by one of the devious sociopaths that the adventure game genre spools out with pretty depressing regularity.
In short, far from laughter, the only thing the demo sets up is that our hero Brian, is — that’s right — a complete dick. Woo! Sign me up for more of this guy!
Meanwhile, Back At Our Original Subject…
Ah, the Smirk of Repentance!
There’s a very fine line between cruel humour and embarassment humour, to the extent that the two often get mistaken for each other. The difference tends to be that one is ultimately self-inflicted… a punishment for sins committed, while the other is usually a less severe twist of fate. Bridget Jones’ granny knickers, for instance, or that old classic of someone using a newspaper to keep out the rain, only to wind up inadvetently soaked in black ink. More than that, and the audience’s sympathy for the victim tends to be too strong to laugh at the character’s misfortune, changing the tone dramatically. Stories where the geeky kid falls prey to the in-crowd’s malicious prank are a good example — while everyone on the screen may be laughing, it takes a very specific kind of audience to join in with the japes.
Most pretentiously, all of this ties into the old cycle of Folly and Redemption, an Ancient Greek concept, which says that every time you make a mistake, you’ll get punished for it in some form, before having a chance to redeem yourself. Refuse to do so, and the whole cycle repeats, except this time, rather more severely, and so on, and so on, until the punishment becomes too devastating to continue.
Sound like any stories you know?
In comedy, it’s a cast iron law. Frasier Crane gets into most of his misadventures because he can’t stop trying to fix everything around him, sending him and his family into a spiral of tragedy that only stops with the episode’s ultimate humiliation. At any point, he could break it… except that he can’t. It’s his own flaws that both set him up and knock him down. And the same applies on the other side. Yakko, Wakko and Dot from the classic show Animaniacs lived to destroy people, with hellish enthusiasm… but only when they’d crossed some line. The rules are down in the show bible, and often saw changes to the storylines. In one case, a character had to be made more unpleasant to justify his torture, in another, the three spent the whole episode desperately hoping that their nanny would let them cut loose — being annoyingly well-meaning not being sufficient to unleash the proverbial fury.
(Of course, their solution was to freelance out the pain to Slappy Squirrel, but hey, comedy’s a spontaneous mistress…)
Ideally, all of this would lead to a snappy explanation of how to make bear rape funny. Sadly, I can’t seem to come up with anything off the top of my head. Maybe you’ve got a good idea. Although while I normally encourage writing in about anything and everything, in this specific case, I think I’ll ask that you keep it to yourself.
And remember, have your pets spayed or neutered.