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Comedy gets no respect. We know this of the movies, where dramas perennially win the Academy Award for best picture, despite a general consensus among actors who have tried both that comedy is harder. Comedy is set aside in a lesser category, as are animation or foreign language films or documentaries, while drama is not. Comedy is not found in the “literature” section of your local bookstore. Yes, capital-L literature often slips in a comic character, or lingers over a bittersweet moment before returning to its regularly scheduled soul-wrenching, but Dostoyevsky still crowds out Swift on the shelves, and on approved reading lists for book reports. Art is drama, to the mind of the art society. Comedy is good as far as it goes, but roughly as important to art as dessert is to nutrition. Such people confuse taking the subject material seriously with taking the art form seriously.
RPGs are no exception. You can find comedy games, usually small press…sometimes very small press, like Kobolds Ate My Baby or Macho Women With Guns. Paranoia and Toon have earned well-deserved praise, but they’re about it for titles to make it past their first supplement.
One player in my group shares this world view. He has unilaterally refused comedy games and silly campaigns at our table. He must suffer a troublesome commute to join us, and can’t be bothered to participate for a mere humorous game. I can sympathize with the commute, but not so much for his attitude toward a comedy game, even a short one. If, as we keep reminding ourselves, RPGs are essentially social activities, maybe we should rate how they perform according to how socially rewarding they are. On this scale, comedy games are the apex of the genre.
Tragedy has its moments in RPGs. I well remember a young priestess turning to dark gods in frustration over an unrequited love for a rather oblivious warrior—good times, a bonding experience. But when it comes to swapping war stories, it’s always the funny scenarios that come to mind first, and the first ones anyone else tells me. Plus, we can remember so many more of them.
I’d like to see the snobbishness towards humor games vanish, as I’d like to see the prejudice against comedy cinema as artistically unworthy vanish—not that it’s going to happen any time soon. But be honest now: can you really make a compelling case that Star Wars is any more rewarding and re-watchable and quotable than Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail? And don’t forget the Ewoks as you do. Yeah, didn’t think so. Why should RPGs be any different?