Comedy in Video Games and VR: The Funniest Real Examples

Comedy in video games and VR works differently from comedy on stage, because the audience is holding the controller. A stand-up controls timing to the millisecond; a game designer has to make something funny happen when the player might do anything at all. The best comedy games solve that problem in surprising ways: they let you be the joke, make the rules the joke, or hand you a role so petty that every action becomes a punchline. This guide covers real games, VR experiments and live streams that have done it, with no imaginary "VR comedy clubs" required.

For the broader story of how new technology changes comedy, see comedy and technology; for comedians who satirise technology, see comedy about technology.

Why comedy is hard in games

Three problems make interactive comedy tricky:

Timing. Jokes depend on rhythm, but players wander off, get stuck or replay a scene ten times. A line that's funny once is grating on the fifth death.
Agency. Comedy often relies on characters making bad decisions. In a game, the player makes the decisions, and nobody enjoys being forced to look stupid.
Repetition. Games are long. A comedy film is 90 minutes; a game might be 20 hours. Running gags have to survive enormous stretches of play.

The games below each found a way around these, which is why they are worth studying even if you never pick up a controller.

The scripted classics

The first great comedy games were point-and-click adventures, which gave writers control over timing because nothing happened until the player clicked. LucasArts led the field. The Secret of Monkey Island (1990), designed by Ron Gilbert with Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman, turned swashbuckling into a satire of pirate clichés; its "insult sword fighting," in which duels are won by matching comebacks to insults, is still one of the cleverest marriages of game mechanic and joke. Day of the Tentacle (1993) was a cartoon farce with time travel, and Schafer's later Grim Fandango and Psychonauts kept the tradition of character-driven game comedy alive.

Valve's Portal (2007) brought scripted comedy into a first-person puzzle game. Its antagonist, the AI GLaDOS (written by Erik Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek, voiced by Ellen McLain), delivers passive-aggressive encouragement and false promises of cake while trying to kill you. Portal 2 (2011) expanded the cast with Stephen Merchant as the hapless robot Wheatley and J.K. Simmons as Cave Johnson, a bombastic company founder heard only in old recordings. It remains one of the best-written comedies in any medium of its decade.

More recently, Disco Elysium (2019) proved that a dense, literary role-playing game about a wrecked detective could also be one of the funniest games ever made, largely because it lets your character's own inner voices argue with and mock him.

The anti-comedy of the game itself

Some of the most inventive comedy games are about games. The Stanley Parable (2013, expanded as Ultra Deluxe in 2022), created by Davey Wreden with William Pugh, puts you in an office as a narrator, voiced by Kevan Brighting, describes what you are about to do. When you disobey, he reacts with irritation, pleading and eventually existential collapse. It is a game-shaped piece of anti-comedy: the joke is the structure, the illusion of choice and the relationship between player and designer.

Other games push the same idea in different directions:

Frog Fractions (2012), a free browser game, pretends to be a dull educational title and then spirals into something else entirely. Explaining further would ruin the joke.
Hypnospace Outlaw (2019) recreates a fictional late-1990s internet, complete with garish homepages, terrible bands and a moral panic, as an affectionate satire of early web culture.
Bennett Foddy's Getting Over It (2017) is a brutally difficult climbing game narrated by its own designer, who calmly philosophises while you lose hours of progress. The frustration is the punchline, and players watching each other fail became a streaming genre of its own.

Physics, slapstick and the joke that plays itself

The other route to game comedy is to let systems generate the jokes. Goat Simulator (2014), from Coffee Stain Studios, began as a joke prototype. You play a goat with a sticky tongue and a ragdoll body, and the studio deliberately kept many of its bugs because the glitches were funnier than any designed gag. Its sequel was cheekily titled Goat Simulator 3, skipping a second game altogether.

Octodad: Dadliest Catch (2014) has you control an octopus pretending to be a human suburban father, with each limb on a separate control. The comedy is the effort of passing as normal, which is also a fairly precise metaphor for a lot of human life.

Untitled Goose Game (2019), from the small Melbourne studio House House, is the purest example. You are a goose in a sleepy English-style village with a to-do list of petty crimes: steal the gardener's keys, trap a boy in a phone box, ruin a picnic. The piano soundtrack reacts to your mischief, and the villagers' weary reactions are timed like silent film. It became a word-of-mouth hit, won major game-of-the-year awards and proved that slapstick could be the entire point of a game. It is absurdist comedy you can play.

VR: when your body is the punchline

Virtual reality adds something no other medium has: your own body. In VR, you physically reach for things, fumble, drop them and knock things over. That makes it a natural home for slapstick.

Job Simulator (2016, Owlchemy Labs) imagines a future where robots have taken every job, and humans visit a museum to experience what work was like. You can do your tasks, or throw staplers at the robot boss, microwave anything and pour coffee on everything. It became one of VR's best-known titles, largely because watching people play it is so funny.
Accounting (2016), a free VR piece from Crows Crows Crows, the studio of The Stanley Parable co-creator William Pugh, made with Squanch Games, is a short, deranged comic journey through nested virtual worlds.
I Expect You to Die (2016, Schell Games) is a spy-parody puzzle game in which your fumbling, physical attempts at escape lead to gloriously stupid deaths.
Trover Saves the Universe (2019, Squanch Games) is a crude, improvisational sci-fi comedy that can be played with or without a headset.

Live comedy in VR has been more experimental. Comedians have performed as avatars in social VR spaces like VRChat, and platforms such as AltspaceVR, which Microsoft closed in 2023, hosted live events where audiences gathered as cartoon figures. These shows are real but small, and they face an obvious problem: comedy depends on reading faces, and avatars still don't show much. So far, VR has been better at making players funny than at hosting comedians.

Twitch, live streams and play as performance

Livestreaming turned playing games into a form of comic performance. Some of the most inventive experiments:

Twitch Plays Pokémon (2014) let tens of thousands of viewers control a single game through chat commands. The chaos, and the in-jokes and "religions" its community invented, became one of the internet's great collective comedies.
Jerma985, a streamer known for absurdist, highly produced streams, staged Jerma's Dollhouse (2022), a live show in which his chat controlled him like a character in a life simulator, in a physical set with actors. It is closer to experimental theatre than to most of what's on television.
Party games as joke-writing contests. Jackbox Games' Quiplash (2015) asks players to write funny answers to prompts, which the audience votes on. It has become a common way for comedians and streamers to play with their audiences, and it is essentially a writers' room turned into a game.
Comedic actual-play. Dropout's Dimension 20, led by Brennan Lee Mulligan, has improvisers and comedians play tabletop role-playing games, turning game rules into structure for long-form improv. It owes as much to the tradition traced in our guide to improv as to games.

The darker side of live interactive comedy appeared with Nothing, Forever, an AI-generated Seinfeld parody that streamed on Twitch nonstop until its 2023 suspension. We cover what went wrong in AI and comedy.

Interactive specials and choose-your-own comedy

Television has experimented with interactivity too. Netflix's Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs the Reverend (2020) let viewers choose Kimmy's actions, with many of the wrong choices leading to deliberately absurd dead ends. Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018), though a thriller, was built around the comic paranoia of a game designer losing control of his own story, and Brooker later made Cat Burglar (2022), an interactive cartoon that tests viewers with trivia questions to keep a slapstick heist going.

Even non-interactive comedy has absorbed game logic. Bo Burnham's Inside borrows the solitary, screen-lit atmosphere of a streaming setup, and many sketch comedians use game and simulation formats as premises. Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal is, in a sense, a reality show built like a game: an endless series of attempts to replay a scenario until it comes out right.

Where to start

Gaming won't replace the comedy club, and VR has not produced the virtual venues once promised. What it has done is quietly prove that comedy can be built out of rules, physics and audience participation, which are, after all, the same raw materials experimental comedians have been playing with on stage for decades.

Frequently asked questions

What are the funniest video games?

Widely loved comedy games include The Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Portal and Portal 2, The Stanley Parable, Goat Simulator, Untitled Goose Game, Octodad, Disco Elysium and the Jackbox party games. They are funny in very different ways, from scripted dialogue to physics-driven slapstick.

Are there comedy games in VR?

Yes. Job Simulator, I Expect You to Die and Accounting are well-known VR comedies, and Trover Saves the Universe can be played in VR. VR suits slapstick and absurd interaction, because your own clumsy hands become part of the joke.

Can you watch live comedy in VR?

Comedians have performed in social VR spaces such as VRChat, and platforms like the now-closed AltspaceVR hosted live events. These remain small and experimental; most comedians who perform online still prefer ordinary livestreams.

Why is Untitled Goose Game funny?

Because it inverts the usual hero role. You play a goose whose only goals are petty acts of chaos in a quiet English village, and the comedy comes from timing, sound design and the villagers' increasingly exasperated reactions, much like a silent slapstick film.