When I was in seventh grade, my history class was a riotous place.  Everyone, including the teacher, made open jokes about all the things we were studying.  History was enjoyable.  Then when we took the tests, I remembered all the jokes, and so remembered everything we had covered in class.  Humor can be a great part of the experience.

  Sometimes people laugh during games.  That should be good, shouldn’t it?  After all, isn’t the point of the game to have fun?  And if people are laughing, they’re probably having fun.  Yet for some reason, a lot of gamers don’t want you to laugh during the game.  They don’t always know why.  Maybe I do.

  Some will say that it’s because laughing spoils the mood.  Yet that’s not really always true.  After all, some of the most frightening scenes in movies are sandwiched between good laughs.  The laughter breaks the tension, offsets the expectation, and leaves the viewer unprepared for the scare that a moment ago he was anticipating.  This can work quite effectively in that medium.  Could it really be that laughter in a game session will destroy the mood?  Obviously sometimes it does; but sometimes it doesn’t.  What’s the difference?

  I’d like to distinguish several types of humor which arise at game sessions; perhaps if we can understand what they are and how they differ, this will help us get to the bottom of this confusion.  After all, laughter is sometimes bad, but sometimes good, and that’s true in nearly any game situation.  So what is it about humor that makes it bad or good?

  Before the confusion arises, this isn’t about kinds of humor in a comedy analysis sort of way.  I’m not talking about slapstick versus puns versus satire.  All of these are valid kinds of humor; and all of them can be funny in a game situation.  I’m not looking at what kind of joke is made.  I’m looking at a different aspect of the joke altogether.  I’m interested in how the joke relates to the game.

  First, there is humor at the game.  This is the sort of disruptive stuff like Monty Python gags and stories you heard at work or read in Knights of the Dinner Table.  At that point, you’re definitely in the social level, out of the game entirely.  This kind of humor is the most disruptive in a game play situation.  It’s very difficult to maintain the mood in a tense moment if every time we get there, George says, A polar bear walks into a bar, orders a Minnesota Blizzard or A Chihuahua walks into a bar, orders a Tequila Sunrise, and so on.  Maybe everyone is having a good time, maybe they all think this is hysterical, and they’re rolling on the floor in hysterics–but it’s likely in this situation that they are not having a good game.  The humor is completely outside play, and is disruptive.

  In a case like this, it may be that this is the wrong night to play.  Or it may be that you need to take a break, run down to the pizza place for an hour to get supper or something, tell all your latest jokes, then come back and settle in for a decent game.  No one wants to say that we don’t get together to tell jokes or have a good time or spend time together.  That’s exactly why we do get together:  to spend time together, sharing things that we find significant or interesting or even funny.  Part of that is supposed to be that we play a game.  If the humor and the game are in each other’s way, they need each to be given their own space and time.

  There is humor about the game.  This happens when someone starts to see absurdities in the setting or the system and making fun of the whole thing.  I’ve got an innkeeper in one of my game cities who speaks with an Irish brogue.  Only once has anyone noticed that there’s no Ireland in my game and he’s the only person in the world that has that accent.  But it’s the kind of thing that could disrupt a game if someone suddenly starts picking at it and finding the absurdity.  That doesn’t mean it isn’t enjoyed by some of the players; but again, it’s out of the game.

  Game play can withstand a little of this once in a while.  Some games can withstand more than others; there can be a lot of fun in fiction that is self-aware, and a game can be a lot of fun precisely because everyone at the table is satirizing the game while playing it.  Some games seem to be written to do exactly that.  However, some games can’t progress as intended if this happens.  If the mood is important, or the tension is desirable, and everyone is stuck on the absurdity of some fragment of the system, the game can be crippled.  So, how come I’m perfectly fine until I lose that last point, and then I’m completely dead?  Why is it that there’s a famine in the land if there are thousands of clerics who can all create food and drink a dozen or more times a day?  If we went back in time by traveling faster than the speed of light, does it really make any sense for us to go forward in time by traveling faster than the speed of light in the other direction?  Once these questions dominate the game session, it’s probably time to get a new game.  Your disbelief suspenders have snapped completely; you need a new pair.

  There is humor from the game.  We tell a great story of one player character who attempted to save himself by using one of two psionic teleportation skills he knew to move his spaceship out of danger.  The thing was, one of the skills had already been shown to move ships without contents, and when he chose the wrong one in his haste he dumped his entire crew in space–a moment about which we still laugh (and which made Dice Tales, which regrettably seems to be no more).  Those funny stories are still a bit disruptive; but they’re something of a metagame humor, something that is funny because we’re both participants and observers.

  In fact, this sort of humor can be very much part of the fun of play.  At this point, we’re probably talking about the moment when someone says, this reminds me of the time, and brings back to everyone’s memory some moment in the past of their characters that is like this, and which was, at least in retrospect, very funny.  It can even be made part of the fourth kind of humor; but I’m getting ahead of myself.

  There is humor in the game.  One of my player characters is very gamist with an occasional narrativist drift.  His character married a non-player character, a very spunky princess he’d rescued.  It is part of the world now that he is married to her, and she is the one person who can always see through his bluster and who knows that for all his posturing and projecting and appearance of confidence, he hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing or how to make it work.  A simple uh-huh or yeah, right from her has the entire table in stitches (including the player) because she bursts his illusions about himself.  She is more than just a comic foil, but she is still a comic foil, giving his stories that humorous charm.

  I’ve had players whose play is inherently fun because it’s funny.  It isn’t that the player is making out-of-character jokes, but that the characters are making in-character jokes and playing in character when they are funny people.  That is not at all disruptive.  It is no more disruptive than the one-liners Bruce Willis spouts in his action films during the fight scenes, or those momentary calms in horror pictures when you thought the killer was going to jump out and he didn’t, and then he did.  In-game humor can be very entertaining.

  In the novel Verse Three, Chapter One, one of my principle characters is of this sort.  He’s very serious about what he does, yet at every turn there are funny things happening.  To try not to spoil anything, near the beginning he’s met three people who go through this long elaborate explanation of how they have to go on a quest to free a djinni from a bottle, because their ancestor captured it and they can’t restore their family home until it’s freed.  After all this, the character says, But, when you free a djinni from a bottle, don’t you get wishes?–to which the teller replies, Well, yes, there is that.  It’s funny; it’s part of the story.  That’s a good thing; generally, it is not disruptive, as long as it is funny, and part of the story, and appropriate to the character and the situation at that moment.

  It is also here that the third and fourth kinds of humor can merge.  It’s one thing for the player to say, remember when this happened?  In a sense, this can disrupt play, as everyone reminisces about the earlier events.  However, it’s entirely different if the character says, this is going to be just like when, and all the other characters are reminded of some fiasco or moment in which the ridiculous dominated their lives.

  That notion of appropriate can mean many different things.  For some characters, a joke at the moment when the villain is about to execute them is the perfect in-character tension breaker, and if the player can pull it off it makes for brilliant and exciting play–particularly if the character can then pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat and turn the tables on the would-be executioner.

  The humor can also be written into the game world.  Bob Newhart is a master at juxtaposition, the art of making ordinary things seem absurd because they are completely surrounded by the absurd as if it were ordinary.  If you can create this kind of humor within the game world, it entertains, particularly if the players get it and the characters don’t.

  For those who are interested in game theory, you might think that humor in a game is a narrativist idea.  It has absolutely nothing to do with whether the game play is narrativist, gamist, or simulationist.  These are all viable possibilities.  Toon makes humor competitive, as the player who makes the referee laugh gets points for it.  In the right world, humor would be very simulationist, because it would be the right color for the situation.  Humor has nothing to do with such concepts.  It only has to do with whether the characters in the game are funny people in funny situations and the players can carry it off effectively.

  The right kind of humor, far from being disruptive, will make for a more enjoyable and more memorable game session.

  I still remember some of the moments of that seventh grade history class.  That was nineteen sixty-seven, more than three and a half decades ago.  I remember little else of that time in life.  Humor made it come alive, and kept it memorable.

  Quite appropriately, I remember the moment the teacher said, When I was a little girl, and one of my fellow students interrupted in the pause to say Were there people then?  So I even remember the jokes–and yes, there were people then.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.