Scott Tepper: Laugh, Clown, Laugh

I have a broken sense of humor.  Well, that’s not exactly right.  What’s broken in me is my ability to tell a joke.  I cannot tell a joke to save my life.

A guy walks into a bar with a dog.  No, wait, it’s a restaurant.  And it was a cat, not a dog.  Damn.  Let me start again…

You get the picture. 

Quizzically, though, I love to laugh.  I’ll laugh at pretty much anything (puns usually only cause me to groan, however).  My siblings and I all learned to laugh in the face of adversity.  To the amazement of outsiders, this ability has served us incredibly well over the years.  So imagine my delight, as I start to play and acquire more and more games, that a lot of people in this industry have senses of humor.  No, strike that, good senses of humor.

Every time I play a new game and come across the sometimes hidden, sometimes blatant, jokes deposited by the designer or publisher, I am delighted.

Some of the instances of humor I’ve come across are subtle.  In Finstere Flure, there are sets of stickers to be applied to colored wooden disks.  Each set of like-colored disks makes up a team.  The purchaser of the game, when applying the stickers before the first play actually has a choice of characters for one of the green disks.  If she isn’t in the know, she might wonder why the green team can choose between a hunched bald guy, or some frightened guy with green hair for the 3/4 token. 

The inside joke is that the green haired guy is actually a cartoon of the designer, Friedemann Friese.  The secondary joke is that he chose to put his character on the green team, which is made up of characters that resemble the Addams Family.  Friedemann’s sense of humor can be found in most of his games, either with his blatant use of the color green or his articulate alliterations using the letter F.

The humor in some games, like Munchkin, or Nodwick, is not only pervasive, it is integral to the game.  In Nodwick, your goal is to quickly assemble a complete Henchman.  To do so, you’ll most certainly need to use several “Duct Tape” cards.

Sometimes the humor of the designer(s) comes out in the rulebook.  In The Hellgame, under the paragraph labelled, Learning To Play The Hellgame, they write, “Do not despair!  The rules are not as involved as they may seem!” How funny is that!?  The authors are saying not to despair as you go into playing a game about Hell.  The winner, though, for the funniest rules of 2007 should go to Galaxy Trucker.  Scattered throughout the rulebook are blurbs commenting on different parts of the rules.  Take, for example the comment following the explanation of acquiring goods: “Dumping goods into space is a violation of anti-littering laws, punishable by fines and imprisonment.  Under no circumstances should you ever tell the authorities that we were the ones who recommended that you do this.”

The game Schrille Stille (which translates to Shrill Silence), which is about promoting your musical acts to number 1 on the charts, never fails to elicit laughter when cards are turned over to reveal such musical acts as Guns’n Noses, Noodle for the Poodle, The Albino Project (with a character who looks suspiciously like Michael Jackson in whiteface), as well as a couple of names that shouldn’t be mentioned on a family website.

In some cases, humor is necessary to make the game playable.  Guillotine uses dark humor to metamorphize the grisly act of a public execution into a family game.  The light hearted artwork and clever wording of the cards enabled me to get past the theme of a game that I originally refused to play.  Who amongst us could deny the allure of a game that had a card titled “Piss Boy”?

Some games thow in a dash of humor in the way they choose the starting player:

• Himalaya: The wisest player begins.  (That’s always fun to decide!)
• Cartagena: The player who looks most like a pirate.  (Anything piratey usually elicits laughter.)
• Employee of the Month: The player with the most tedious real-life job (There’s always a fight to claim this title.)
• Igor: The Mad Scientist Lament: The player with the best maniacal laugh (This game starts out with everyone laughing.)
• The Bridges of Shangrila: Whoever has climbed Mount Everest on white and blue checkered stilts made from the veneer of the nut tree or the wood of the redwood tree.  (my personal favorite starting rule)

Killer Bunnies definitely deserves a mention when discussing humor.  The jokes in this game pervade the artwork, card text, and rulebook.  While I thought clarity in the original rulebook was eclipsed by the humor of the designers, there is no question that they put a lot of effort (and achieved much success) into making players laugh.  The cartoons on the cards are done exceptionally well, and cards with names such as Green Gelatin (with evil pineapple chunks), Large Prune Danish, and The Magic Spatula can make the most dour players smile.

My favorite joke, though, comes from one of my favorite games, Traumfabrik.  In an obvious nod to Alfred Hitchcock, Reiner Knizia put himself on one of the guest star tokens with a rating of 1 black star.  If a player incorporates this token into one of their movies, instead of increasing the value of the film, it reduces the total star value by one point.  The game would play exactly the same without this token, so its addition is a wonderful joke that fits perfectly into the theme. It’s pure, inspired comic genius.

For me, the idea of playing games is to have a good time.  While anything to excess can be detrimental, most any game experience can be improved with a touch of humor.  Would the Mona Lisa be as popular if she didn’t have that hint of a smile?  I don’t think so.  Let’s hope that more game designers take Leonardo’s famous example to heart.

Comments:

< Back Home