Games can take us to new worlds in order to let us live out our wildest dreams, whether that’s riding across a fantasy landscape, traveling to other galaxies, or shooting Nazis in the face. But what if you just want to laugh and forget your troubles? Sometimes we just want a good joke. Although most games don’t focus on comedy, the games on this list bring the funny. With humor that ranges from subtle to silly, these are the funniest games out there.
Bulletstorm
Subtlety is not Bullestorm’s strong suit. It’s a gory, hyper-masculine story of space soldiers with crass humor and absurd violence. More importantly, it’s a macho shooter that makes fun of macho shooters. Anyone who enjoyed classic shooters will find something to like here on a gameplay level, but Bulletstorm takes the violent power fantasy of old school shooters so far that it becomes hard not to laugh. The game rewards you for killing enemies in creative and often ludicrous ways. It’s this kind of hilarious (and completely on-point) commentary about the hyper-masculine shooters that we’re so familiar with that makes the game a laugh fest as well as a storm of bullets.
This post was originally written by Cody Mello-Klein.
WarioWare Series
Wacky mini games are only part of what make the WarioWare games so oddly funny. Whether you’re picking a big nose or trying to balance a broom on your palm, the WarioWare games tap into a weirdness that most of Nintendo’s franchises usually only offer in bite-sized chunks. A large part of what makes this series so hilarious is the gameplay: a series of rapid fire minigames that you have to learn on the fly. Scrambling to understand the control scheme and idea for each game makes failure just as funny as success. Add to that motion controls that became a staple part of the series (WarioWare: Smooth Moves on the Wii) and you have a recipe for great physical humor and ridiculousness. Watching friends or family make fools of themselves never gets old.
South Park: The Stick of Truth
The biggest compliment that we can pay South Park: The Stick of Truth is that it looks and feels exactly like a South Park episode. The same juvenile humor (poop and fart jokes abound) and no-holds-barred approach to satire that’s entertained fans of the show all these years is still here, as Matt Stone and Trey Parker take the time to pick apart the conventions of fantasy RPGs. There are several gross-out gags and some boss battles that would be difficult to explain to a family member if they walk in on you playing The Stick of Truth, but the humor is always entertaining if not flat out funny. Few games dare to go into the territory that The Stick of Truth approaches. But then again, few games are so consistently hilarious.
Saints Row IV
Sometimes all it takes to make us laugh is a big purple sex toy and Keith David. What? Don’t judge! The Saints Row series started out as a Grand Theft Auto clone, but it quickly distinguished itself through pure, unadulterated zaniness. The fourth game finds the player character, leader of a gang called the 3rd Street Saints, now serving as President of the United States. In the first five minutes it’s established that the vice president is actor Keith David (played by Keith David) and that aliens have invaded the world. Dubstep guns, the aforementioned big purple sex toy, and superpowers also come into play.
Saints Row IV is stupid, sometimes cringey fun, and developer Volition knows it. There’s a lot of tongue-in-cheek humor and pop culture references. There are also a ton of ridiculous weapons and costumes for the player to use and wear, which only makes the open world chaos more absurd. Charging down the street with super speed while wearing a giant cat mask and nothing else is one of the many pleasures of Saints Row IV, and it’s that crank-everything-to-11 approach to humor that makes the game gut-busting good fun.
Conker’s Bad Fur Day
For those who grew up on family-friendly platformers with cute animal mascots, Conker’s Bad Fury Day was a breath of foul-mouthed air. Conker, the drunk, profanity-spewing squirrel, was definitely not like Mario. The game had its sights aimed at those cute platformers, and its lewd humor, movie references, and relative maturity subverted the expectations many fans of the genre had. Conker’s isn’t subtle and it definitely isn’t high-brow humor (there’s a singing piece of poop), but there are few things that are as viscerally funny as watching a cute little squirrel binge drink and spout profanities. It all still works because Conker’s cleverly skewers a popular genre while still embracing Matrix spoofs and, let’s not forget, singing poop.
Tales from the Borderlands
It might only have one season, but Telltale’s Tales from the Borderlands (say that five times fast) is still one of the funniest and engaging entries in the developer’s adventure game catalog. The Borderlands universe was already full of eccentric characters and brilliantly stupid jokes (Butt Stallion, anyone?). Tales from the Borderlands managed to distill all of that off the wall humor into a really engaging story about corporate douchebags, petty criminals, and treasure hunters. Telltale created some hilarious characters, like Loader Bot and Hugo Vasquez, and pitted them against one another in increasingly strange and insane scenarios. The game also features one of the most absurd and genuinely funny fight sequences in any game: the finger gun shootout in Hyperion’s headquarters.
Grand Theft Auto V
That’s right, one of the most successful games of all time is also one of the most hilarious. Grand Theft Auto has always had a satirical edge to it, but GTA V was the first entry to be downright funny. Rockstar mines the Silicon Valley tech bubble and SoCal celebrity culture for all its worth. The cultural commentary is as blunt as a hammer but it’s usually spot on, and the characters (particularly Trevor, the madman with a heart of gold) have some over the top dialogue that makes every cutscene a darkly humorous take on the American Dream. But even listening to the dialogue that NPCs spout when you run past them, anything from absurdly creative insults to indignation, is worth a chuckle.
Ratchet and Clank Series
Pixar-quality animation meets colorful science fiction universe meets quirky buddy comedy. It’s an odd combination that’s worked wonders for Insomniac’s classic Sony series. Ratchet and Clank have enough delightful odd couple chemistry and witty banter to support the series all on their own, but the series’ true comic weapon is Captain Qwark. An unreliable, ego-maniacal narrator who masquerades as a green-costumed superhero, Qwark may switch from villain to ally across the series, but he never loses his hilariously smarmy overconfidence. The universe of Ratchet and Clank is also full of enough bizarre alien races and locations to fill an entire Star Wars trilogy. The series’ famously wacky weapons (special shoutout to the Qwak-o-Ray, which turns enemies into ducks) help make gameplay a fun (and funny) experience too.
The Secret of Monkey Island
If you’re familiar with Tim Schafer and the early LucasArts point-and-click adventure games, then you know about the one-liners and eccentric characters that make The Secret of Monkey Island such a delight to play. Seriously, it’s impossible not to smile or chuckle when you play this game. There are numerous gags and witty remarks in The Secret of Monkey Island that are worth a chuckle or a laugh, but it’s the insult sword fighting that secures it a place on this list. Two pirates battling with swords on the deck of a ship is a tired trope. Two sword fighters battling with insults and comebacks in order to secure an advantage? That’s a joke worthy of a Monty Python sketch.
Portal 2
The original Portal gave us some great dark humor in the form of GLaDOS, the snide robot whose obsession with testing physics puzzles makes her as likely to kill you as insult your mother. Portal 2 built on that foundation and in the end, it’s a game that pushes the humor and characters even further than in Valve’s original game. GLaDOS still tosses out insults left and right with a deadpan delivery that’s hard not to enjoy, but this time she’s not the only one getting laughs. Wheatley, an ignorant, insecure spherical robot, is the source of a lot of the game’s biggest laughs with his dry humor and complete ineptitude at most tasks. Between GLaDOS and Wheatley, Portal 2 offers more of the quirky, dark humor that the first game already had in spades without losing any of the quality. The cake might be a lie, but saying that Portal 2 is one of the funniest games out there certainly isn’t.
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