I was about twelve years old the first time a video game made me actually laugh out loud. Not a polite chuckle, not a smile — a real, genuine, unexpected laugh that caught me completely off guard. It was something a background NPC said in a LucasArts adventure game, a throwaway joke buried in a menu screen that nobody was supposed to find. That was the moment I realized that games could be genuinely, brilliantly funny — not just fun to play, but funny in the way good writing is funny.
Comedy in games is one of the hardest things to pull off. Unlike films and books, jokes have to land while the player is also trying not to die, solve a puzzle, or navigate a menu. The timing is different. The delivery has to survive repetition. And the humor has to feel like part of the world, not bolted onto it from the outside.
The games below managed all of that — and then some. This is a list of the 50 funniest video games ever written, across every genre, era, and platform.
What Makes a Game Actually Funny?
Before getting into the list, it’s worth separating different types of comedy you’ll find here:
- Sharp writing — dialogue, jokes, and observations that work because the writing is genuinely good
- Satirical humor — games that mock a genre, a culture, or even the medium itself
- Absurdist comedy — games built around a premise so ridiculous that the humor comes from committing to it completely
- Physical comedy — chaos and physics that generate emergent humor from gameplay itself
- Meta humor — fourth-wall breaks, self-awareness, and games that make jokes about being games
Most of the best comedy games do more than one of these at once. The very best do all five.
The 50 Funniest Video Games Ever Written
1. Portal 2 (2011)
Developer: Valve | Platform: PC, PS3, Xbox 360
Portal 2 might be the funniest game ever made by a major studio. GLaDOS — the murderous AI who hates you specifically and is delighted about it — is one of the greatest comedic characters ever written for any medium. Wheatley, voiced by Stephen Merchant, delivers an endlessly entertaining arc from bumbling sidekick to catastrophically incompetent villain. Cave Johnson’s recorded announcements are a masterpiece of corporate satire.
What makes Portal 2 exceptional is how the humor is embedded in every layer — the environmental storytelling, the puzzle design, the loading screens. The funniest moments aren’t scripted cutscenes you watch — they’re lines delivered casually while you’re trying to figure out a puzzle, which means you’re caught completely off guard. Every single time.
2. The Secret of Monkey Island (1990)
Developer: LucasArts | Platform: PC, modern ports
The foundational text of video game comedy. Guybrush Threepwood — the most hapless aspiring pirate in fiction — navigates a Caribbean adventure full of witty dialogue, clever puzzles, and an atmosphere of sustained, warm absurdism. The insult sword fighting mechanic, in which duels are won by delivering better comebacks than your opponent, is one of the most purely funny gameplay systems ever designed.
Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer’s writing established a template for adventure game humor that influenced every comedy game that followed. The jokes land because they trust the player’s intelligence, never go for easy targets, and build comedic momentum across the entire game rather than relying on isolated gags.
3. South Park: The Stick of Truth (2014)
Developer: Obsidian Entertainment | Platform: PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One
The game that finally proved a South Park video game could be as funny as the show — because Matt Stone and Trey Parker wrote every line of it. You play as the New Kid — a silent protagonist the town immediately nicknames “Douchebag” — as you become embroiled in an epic fantasy battle between children in a mountain Colorado town.
The game is an RPG parody, a South Park episode, and a fairly sharp satire of video game tropes all at once. It commits to its premise with the same fearless escalation the show is famous for, and the results include some of the most shockingly funny moments in any game — including one scene set inside a man’s colon that you simply have to experience for yourself.
4. Conker’s Bad Fur Day (2001)
Developer: Rare | Platform: Nintendo 64
The most R-rated game Nintendo ever approved. Conker the Squirrel is a hungover, foul-mouthed red squirrel who wanders through an adult parody of family-friendly platformer tropes — complete with operatic singing poo, a Saving Private Ryan pastiche, and a Matrix boss fight. The game’s opening is a parody of Stanley Kubrick. Its villain is a megalomaniacal Panther King who needs a squirrel to fix a wobbling table.
Rare’s writing here was genuinely subversive — they took the visual language of the cutesy Nintendo platformer and ran it directly into an adult comedy. The contrast between Conker’s adorable appearance and his deeply profane behavior is the joke that never stops landing.
5. Grim Fandango (1998)
Developer: LucasArts | Platform: PC, modern remaster
Tim Schafer’s masterpiece. Set in the Land of the Dead — a purgatory styled as a film noir crossing Aztec mythology with 1940s crime fiction — Grim Fandango follows Manny Calavera, a skeletal travel agent who uncovers a massive corruption scandal in the Department of Death. The writing is consistently, brilliantly funny without ever betraying the genuine emotional weight of the story underneath.
The humor here is sophisticated — dry, character-based, and rooted in a world so completely imagined that the jokes feel like they emerge naturally from it. Manny’s sardonic delivery, his enormous travel agent nemesis Hector LeMans, and the magnificently unhinged mechanic Glottis make this one of the richest comedic casts in gaming history.
6. The Stanley Parable (2013)
Developer: Galactic Café | Platform: PC, Xbox One, Switch, PS4
The Stanley Parable is a comedy game about free will, obedience, and the nature of video games themselves — but mostly it’s an exercise in comedic escalation. The omnipresent narrator wants you to follow his script. When you don’t, he adjusts, recalculates, and sometimes has a quiet breakdown. The further you deviate from his plan, the funnier it gets.
The genius of the writing is that the game is always two steps ahead of whatever you think you’re doing. Every ending is its own comedy piece. The Broom Closet ending, the Baby Game ending, and the Mind Control Facility ending are three of the funniest individual moments in any game, full stop.
7. Disco Elysium (2019)
Developer: ZA/UM | Platform: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox, Switch
Disco Elysium is primarily a philosophical RPG and a tragedy — but it’s also frequently hilarious. Harry Du Bois, your amnesiac detective protagonist, is narrated by 24 skill voices inside his own head that argue, compete, and occasionally say deeply unhinged things at completely inappropriate moments. The Electrochemistry skill in particular will tell you to do the most insane things during the most serious conversations.
The humor emerges from the gap between how seriously the game takes its ideas and how spectacularly Harry fails at almost everything. Passing a skill check feels triumphant. Failing one — which Harry often does by attempting something extremely ambitious while dangerously hungover — is usually funnier.
8. Psychonauts (2005)
Developer: Double Fine | Platform: PC, PS2, Xbox, modern ports
Another Tim Schafer gem, and possibly his most inventive comedy. Raz is a kid who sneaks into Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp to train as a Psychonaut — an agent who enters people’s minds to solve psychological problems. Every mind Raz enters is a completely different world shaped by its owner’s obsessions, phobias, and delusions.
A conspiracy theorist’s mind is a suburb where a milkman is definitely not surveilling everyone. An actress’s mind is a black-and-white film noir where she’s constantly auditioning. The camp’s collection of campers is one of the most original casts of comedic supporting characters in gaming, and every single one of them has a fully realized inner world to explore.
9. Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge (1991)
Developer: LucasArts | Platform: PC, modern ports
The sequel that arguably surpassed the original. LeChuck’s Revenge is darker, stranger, and funnier — with Guybrush pursuing the four pieces of a legendary treasure while his undead nemesis LeChuck closes in behind him. The humor expanded from the first game’s pirate parody into something more surreal and ambitious, with some of the best puzzle writing in the adventure game genre’s history.
The coffin puzzle. The spitting contest. The pie-eating contest. Each one is a masterpiece of absurdist game design that wouldn’t work in any other medium.
10. Saints Row IV (2013)
Developer: Volition | Platform: PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One
The Saints Row series always played fast and loose with sanity, but the fourth entry achieved a kind of liberated comedy chaos that few games have matched. You play as the President of the United States — your own customizable character from the previous games — who gains superpowers after an alien invasion and must save the Earth from inside a Matrix-style simulation.
The game is simultaneously a parody of superhero games, open-world games, political satire, and video game culture in general. It’s a love letter to gaming written by people who find games absolutely ridiculous — and it’s brilliantly self-aware about every absurd choice it makes.
11. Borderlands 2 (2012)
Developer: Gearbox Software | Platform: PC, PS3, Xbox 360, Switch
Handsome Jack — the game’s antagonist — is one of the funniest villains in video game history. He narrates your journey across Pandora via radio in real time, offering commentary on your progress that ranges from gleeful mockery to genuine bewilderment at your continued survival. He’s charming, evil, and incredibly funny in a way that makes you half-root for him despite everything.
The writing around Jack elevated the entire game. The first Borderlands was enjoyable chaos. The sequel had genuine comic voice, and a lot of that came from having an antagonist worth spending time with.
12. Untitled Goose Game (2019)
Developer: House House | Platform: PC, Switch, PS4, Xbox One
A game with almost no writing that is nonetheless extremely funny because of its premise and commitment. You are a horrible goose. The village you live near wants to go about its day. You will not allow this. The game presents you with increasingly cruel objectives — steal a child’s toy, make a man hit himself with a rake, get a tiny hat from a market stall — and delights in the spectacle of a mildly sized goose terrorizing a very orderly English town.
The physical comedy of geese in general — their arrogant waddle, the honk, the way they approach challenges with total humorless determination — does half the work. The game supplies the rest.
13. Earthworm Jim (1994)
Developer: Shiny Entertainment | Platform: SNES, Genesis, modern ports
A game that opened with its hero accidentally running over a puppy, firing a cow into space to create a distraction, and fighting a villain named Psy-Crow across levels with names like “New Junk City” and “What the Heck.” Earthworm Jim was the 1990s platformer pushed into pure comedic absurdism — a superhero game built entirely around a worm who found a power suit by accident and is clearly not equipped for any of what follows.
The sequel added Princess What’s-Her-Name, a flying Pocket Rocket, and a boss who is literally just a Major Malfunction.
14. Sam & Max Hit the Road (1993)
Developer: LucasArts | Platform: PC
The first Sam & Max game remains one of the funniest adventure games ever made. Sam is a dog detective. Max is a hyperviolent rabbit he describes as his “little buddy.” Together they investigate a missing Bigfoot from a carnival freak show across an increasingly unhinged road trip through American tourist traps. The dialogue between Sam and Max is extraordinary — they have a comedic chemistry that still feels fresh decades later.
Max in particular — casually suggesting violence as the solution to every puzzle, with cheerful detachment — is one of gaming’s great comedy characters.
15. Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal (2004)
Developer: Insomniac Games | Platform: PS2
The third main Ratchet & Clank game is the funniest entry in a consistently funny franchise. Captain Qwark — the franchise’s blustering, cowardly superhero who is mostly famous for taking credit for other people’s heroism — reaches his comedic peak here. The game parodies action blockbusters, celebrity culture, and the video game industry itself with a wit that worked for both the children the game was rated for and the adults who played it with them.
The Ratchet & Clank series in general understood something many games miss: humor and genuine heart aren’t mutually exclusive, and characters can be funny and lovable at the same time.
16. Warioware Series (2003–present)
Developer: Nintendo | Platform: GBA, DS, Wii, Switch
A series built entirely on comedy timing. WarioWare presents you with five-second microgames with almost no context — “poke the nose,” “jump,” “don’t blink” — and fires them at you in rapid sequence. The humor comes from the whiplash of switching between completely unrelated tasks at increasing speed, the absurdity of each microgame’s concept, and the deliberately terrible animation style Nintendo committed to with total confidence.
Wario himself — Nintendo’s Id, a greedy, flatulent, contemptible anti-Mario — is one of the funniest characters in their entire roster.
17. The Simpsons: Hit & Run (2003)
Developer: Radical Entertainment | Platform: PS2, GameCube, Xbox, PC
The best Simpsons game ever made, and one of the funniest licensed games in existence. Hit & Run captured the show’s comic rhythms in a way most licensed games never approach — because the Simpsons writers were genuinely involved and the game trusted that humor, not just fanservice, was the point. Springfield is full of Simpsons jokes, and the dialogue between characters is authentically funny rather than a pale imitation of the show’s voice.
It’s also a surprisingly solid open-world driving game, which made the comedy land even harder because you were actually having fun while it was happening.
18. Goat Simulator (2014)
Developer: Coffee Stain Studios | Platform: PC, mobile, console
Coffee Stain Studios built a broken physics playground, realized the bugs were funnier than anything they could write on purpose, and released it as a feature. Goat Simulator is a game about being a goat with a tongue that can latch onto objects and drag them across the world, a jetpack, and absolutely no coherent objective beyond causing as much chaos as possible.
The humor here is emergent — it happens differently every time, based on how the ragdoll physics interact with the environment and your particular brand of goat-based chaos. No two playthroughs produce the same scenes of carnage.
19. Octodad: Dadliest Catch (2014)
Developer: Young Horses | Platform: PC, PS4, Switch, mobile
An octopus is living as a human man with a wife and children who have not noticed he is an octopus. This is the game’s entire premise, and it is perfect. You control Octodad’s individual tentacles to perform mundane household tasks — mowing the lawn, cooking breakfast, going grocery shopping — with controls deliberately designed to make everything impossible. The gap between the normality of the tasks and the utter chaos of performing them as a cephalopod is the joke.
The voice acting from the family, who remain cheerfully oblivious to every disaster Octodad causes while trying to seem normal, is pitch-perfect.
20. Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude (2004)
Developer: High Voltage Software | Platform: PC, PS2, Xbox
A complicated entry to recommend — the series has aged poorly in some respects — but at its peak, the Larry franchise was a sharp satire of male delusion wrapped around a genuinely clever adventure game. Larry Laffer’s desperate, perpetually unsuccessful attempts at romance were funny because the game was clearly laughing at him, not celebrating him. The writing was weirder and smarter than the premise suggested.
21. Fallout: New Vegas (2010)
Developer: Obsidian Entertainment | Platform: PC, PS3, Xbox 360
New Vegas treats the post-apocalypse as an opportunity for extremely dry, extremely dark comedy. The Super Mutants have philosophical debates about the nature of the universe. The NCR is a corrupt bureaucracy staffed by people who are baffled by their own existence. Caesar’s Legion is a Roman Empire cosplay collective in the Nevada desert. The game’s tone is consistently, quietly hilarious — never broad, always earned.
The writing around minor NPCs and faction dialogue is particularly strong. New Vegas is a game where you can join a cult dedicated to worshipping ancient appliances, and the cult is written with complete sincerity.
22. Deadpool (2013)
Developer: High Moon Studios | Platform: PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360
Deadpool the character is a fourth-wall-breaking mercenary who is aware he’s in a video game — and this game leans fully into that premise. He literally breaks into the developer’s office to pitch his own game. He reads the game’s dialogue script out loud. He gets bored during his own story and jumps to different sections. The self-aware humor is deployed with enough speed and variety that it stays funny far longer than it should.
Nolan North’s voice performance as Deadpool is masterful — the character’s constant commentary on his own adventure is delivered with infectious enthusiasm that makes even the most groan-worthy jokes land.
23. Monkey Island: The Curse of Monkey Island (1997)
Developer: LucasArts | Platform: PC
The third Monkey Island game introduced hand-drawn animation and full voice acting — including Dominic Armato as Guybrush, a performance that nailed the character’s specific combination of bumbling earnestness and accidental competence. The writing expanded the insult swordfighting into insult arm-wrestling, introduced the brilliant villain Lechuck-as-a-ghost, and had some of the funniest individual set pieces in the adventure game genre.
The song “A Pirate I Was Meant to Be” — performed by Guybrush and his crew while they refuse to stop singing to get back to the plot — is one of gaming’s great comedic moments.
24. Jazzpunk (2014)
Developer: Necrophone Games | Platform: PC, Mac
One of the most underrated comedy games ever made. Set in a retro-futuristic Cold War parody, Jazzpunk puts you in the shoes of Agent Polyblank, sent on espionage missions that immediately spiral into complete absurdity. Every inch of the environment is stuffed with interactive jokes — furniture, background objects, NPCs — at a jokes-per-square-meter density that no other game has matched.
The humor is deliberately surreal, referencing everything from 1950s B-movies to internet culture to pizza, and the pace is relentless. Jazzpunk assumes you’ll miss half the jokes on a first playthrough and rewards exploration with a second layer of comedy underneath the first.
25. Papers, Please (2013)
Developer: Lucas Pope | Platform: PC, Mac, iOS
Technically a game about working as a border control officer in a Soviet-style dystopia — and it’s genuinely tense — but Papers, Please generates a specific kind of very dark comedy from the absurdity of bureaucratic systems. The stamp. The regulations. The endless rule changes. The desperate stories people tell you at the window while you check their paperwork for inconsistencies. It’s funnier than it has any right to be, mostly because the situation is so deliberately bleak.
26. South Park: The Fractured but Whole (2017)
Developer: Ubisoft San Francisco | Platform: PC, PS4, Xbox One, Switch
The sequel to Stick of Truth shifted from fantasy parody to superhero movie parody — and the timing couldn’t have been better. The MCU satire hits hard, the new mechanics (including a combat system with time manipulation) are genuinely inventive, and Matt and Trey’s writing maintained the same anarchic energy as the original. The character creation sequence — in which the game gradually reveals that its difficulty setting affects skin color rather than gameplay — is one of the most audacious comedy bits in any game.
27. Monkey Island 4: Escape from Monkey Island (2000)
Developer: LucasArts | Platform: PC, PS2
The franchise’s fourth installment leaned hardest into meta humor — there’s a subplot about a theme park developer buying up all the Caribbean pirate islands and replacing them with sanitized tourist experiences, which is simultaneously a joke about Disney and a commentary on the adventure game genre’s decline. The humor was sharper and more self-aware than any previous entry, with Guybrush himself occasionally acknowledging the weirdness of his own existence.
28. Hades (2020)
Developer: Supergiant Games | Platform: PC, Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox
Hades is primarily an excellent action game and a moving story about family — but it’s also consistently, warmly funny. Zagreus’s relationship with the Olympian gods is a comedy of cosmic dysfunction: Zeus is a pompous blowhard who can’t stop talking about himself, Dionysus is extremely chill about literally everything, and Aphrodite is dangerously interested in Zagreus’s personal life. Skelly, the skeletal training dummy, is inexplicably everyone’s favorite character despite having no business being as funny as he is.
29. Yakuza 0 (2015)
Developer: Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio | Platform: PS3, PS4, PC, Xbox
The Yakuza series is famous for its tonal whiplash — you go from an intensely serious organized crime drama to a substory about managing a dominatrix business or helping a kid find his lost robot toy in the space of ten minutes. Yakuza 0 executes this contrast better than any entry before or since. The substories — self-contained comedic side missions — are some of the funniest content in any open-world game, ranging from film noir parodies to bizarre love triangles involving a video rental store.
30. What the Golf? (2019)
Developer: Triband | Platform: PC, Switch, iOS
A golf game that immediately becomes a game about everything except golf. Within minutes of starting, you’re hitting a house instead of a ball, then a person, then abstract geometric shapes, then the concept of golf itself. What the Golf? generates new comedy from pure surprise — every hole is a subversion of what you thought you knew about the previous hole, and the game escalates its own absurdism with the discipline of a master comedian.
31. Worms Armageddon (1999)
Developer: Team17 | Platform: PC, PS1, N64, GBA
A turn-based strategy game about teams of worms armed with holy hand grenades, exploding sheep, banana bombs, and a concrete donkey — which, when deployed, falls from the sky and bounces across the map destroying everything. The humor is physical and emergent: plans go wrong in spectacular ways, wind changes direction at crucial moments, and worms scream in tiny voices as they are launched off cliffs into the ocean.
The series has been running for over 25 years because the formula generates new comedy indefinitely.
32. The Bard’s Tale (2004)
Developer: inXile Entertainment | Platform: PC, Xbox, PS2
A satirical RPG in which the Bard — voiced by Cary Elwes — is an unambiguously selfish anti-hero with no interest in quests, prophecies, or saving anyone. The game’s unseen narrator describes heroic events while the Bard delivers sardonic commentary questioning every single one. When given a choice between good and snarky responses, choosing snarky consistently produces the best results.
The fourth-wall humor and the Bard’s total rejection of fantasy RPG conventions made this one of the sharpest genre parodies of its era.
33. Fable II (2008)
Developer: Lionhead Studios | Platform: Xbox 360
The Fable series was built around Peter Molyneux’s tendency to overpromise and the resulting gap between expectation and delivery — which it acknowledged with remarkable good humor. Fable II is full of gentle, warm British wit. The demon doors have opinions about everything. The NPCs notice your reputation and comment on it with increasingly extreme reactions. The dog companion — who has no voice — somehow generates more comedic moments through his expressions and behavior than characters with full dialogue trees.
34. Splosion Man (2009)
Developer: Twisted Pixel Games | Platform: Xbox 360, PC
A platformer about a failed lab experiment who can only solve problems by exploding himself repeatedly. Splosion Man is an extremely silly game that commits to its premise with absolute confidence — the titular character communicates entirely through movie quotes, food references, and unintelligible excitement, and the game never explains this or apologizes for it.
35. Bully (2006)
Developer: Rockstar Games | Platform: PS2, PC, Xbox 360, modern ports
Rockstar’s smaller, funnier, and more affectionate satire of school life. You play as Jimmy Hopkins, a new student at Bullworth Academy — a chaotic boarding school populated by the most exaggerated versions of high school stereotypes imaginable. The teachers are petty and dysfunctional, the cliques are ridiculous, and the school’s social hierarchy is clearly more insane than any adult institution. The writing is sharp, the characters are funny, and the whole thing has a warmth that GTA never quite managed.
36. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (2021)
Developer: Insomniac Games | Platform: PS5
The most technically impressive Ratchet & Clank game continues the franchise’s tradition of sharp, warm comedy. New character Rivet — an alternate-dimension Lombax — is given a full comedic arc, and the interdimensional villain Emperor Nefarious is a spectacular comedy creation: an alternate-dimension version of a villain who failed so often he decided to just find a dimension where he already won. The game is visually stunning and consistently funny, which is a combination that’s harder to achieve than it looks.
37. Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (1987)
Developer: Sierra On-Line | Platform: PC, modern remake
Al Lowe’s original Larry was a quietly subversive comedy — the jokes were as much about Larry’s delusion as his objectives, and the game was kinder to the women Larry was pursuing than the genre usually managed. The 2013 remake, developed by Replay Games with Lowe’s involvement, updated the humor for modern sensibilities while keeping the original’s genuine affection for its hapless protagonist.
38. Stardew Valley (2016)
Developer: ConcernedApe | Platform: PC, Switch, PS4, Xbox, mobile
Not primarily a comedy game — but Stardew Valley has an extraordinarily dry, warm sense of humor that runs through every character and event in the valley. Pierre’s quiet resentment of JojaMart. Haley’s gradual revelation that she’s much weirder and funnier than she initially appears. The traveling merchant who shows up every Monday and Friday and sells things at prices that are genuinely absurd. Mayor Lewis and his shorts. The writing here is unassuming and wonderful.
39. Monkey Island: Tales of Monkey Island (2009)
Developer: Telltale Games | Platform: PC, PS3, Wii, mobile
Telltale’s episodic return to Monkey Island used the episodic format well — each episode escalated the comedy while building a serialized narrative that rewarded long-term fans of the series. The return of Guybrush’s voice actor Dominic Armato and the expansion of LeChuck’s backstory added genuine emotional depth to the traditional Monkey Island formula of comedic puzzle-solving and pirate absurdism.
40. Bugsnax (2020)
Developer: Young Horses | Platform: PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox
Bugsnax presents a beautiful island populated by creatures that are half bug, half snack food — a strawberry with legs, a hot dog on a bun body, a pretzel crab — and asks you to catch them using elaborate contraptions while investigating the disappearance of an explorer. The premise is designed to generate a specific kind of baffled, incredulous laughter, and it succeeds every time a new creature species is introduced.
The supporting cast of Grumpuses who have followed the missing explorer to the island are broadly written but consistently funny, particularly the bickering couple Elizabert and Eggabell.
41. Purrfect Apawcalypse (2021)
Developer: Accidental Queens | Platform: PC, Switch
A visual novel about the end of the world, written entirely from the perspective of a dog. The dog narrator does not fully understand what is happening and explains apocalyptic events in the most cheerfully obtuse terms possible. The humor comes entirely from the gap between the dog’s sunny perspective and the complete disaster unfolding around them.
42. Monster Prom (2018)
Developer: Beautiful Glitch | Platform: PC, Switch
A dating sim set in a monster high school where you’re trying to ask someone to prom in three weeks. Monster Prom is very funny specifically because its characters — a vampire who’s on too many social media platforms, a gorgon who runs a pharmaceutical empire, a ghost who is vibing — are written with a millennial/gen-Z sensibility that’s consistently sharper and more self-aware than the premise suggests.
43. The Outer Worlds (2019)
Developer: Obsidian Entertainment | Platform: PC, PS4, Xbox One, Switch
A corporate satire set in a colonized solar system where every planet is owned by a megacorporation and every system is designed to exploit workers while telling them it’s for their own good. The Outer Worlds is very funny and very angry at the same time — a rare combination. The companion characters, particularly Parvati and Vicar Max, are genuinely charming, and the game’s low-skill dialogue options produce some of the best comedic responses in any RPG.
44. Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga (2007)
Developer: Traveller’s Tales | Platform: PC, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, DS
The Lego games as a franchise are built on a single comedy insight: taking extremely serious material and performing it entirely in pantomime, with no words, using Lego minifigures. Darth Vader sitting down to cry after a difficult day. Han Solo tripping over blocks. The Emperor doing a silly dance. The Complete Saga remains the high point of this formula, partly because the Star Wars prequel trilogy was already unintentionally funny and the game had rich material to work with.
45. Fallout 4 (2015)
Developer: Bethesda | Platform: PC, PS4, Xbox One
The Fallout series is consistently funny, but Fallout 4’s Boston wasteland in particular is full of dry, dark comedy. Codsworth, your pre-war butler robot who has been maintaining the house for 210 years while the world ended, is a comedic creation of genuine warmth. The Nuka-Cola franchise — a carbonated soft drink cult that has essentially replaced religion in the post-nuclear world — is the franchise’s funniest running joke.
46. Night in the Woods (2017)
Developer: Infinite Fall | Platform: PC, Switch, PS4, Xbox
Night in the Woods is primarily a game about depression, small-town decay, and what happens after your dreams don’t work out — but Mae Borowski, the cat protagonist who dropped out of college and came home, is one of the funniest character voices in any indie game. Her internal monologue is full of the specific, chaotic humor of someone who copes with everything by being very funny about it, and the writing of her friendships — particularly with Gregg and Angus — is warm and genuinely charming.
47. Drawful (2014, Jackbox Party Pack series)
Developer: Jackbox Games | Platform: PC, consoles, streaming
Not a traditionally written comedy game — the humor in Drawful and the broader Jackbox Party Pack series is generated almost entirely by players — but the game deserves recognition for creating a comedy engine with extraordinary consistent output. You draw terrible pictures of impossible prompts. Other players guess what they are. Everyone is wrong in the most entertaining way possible. Drawful turned drawing badly into the best party game mechanic since Cards Against Humanity.
48. Costume Quest (2010)
Developer: Double Fine | Platform: PC, PS3, Xbox 360, mobile
A small, warm, funny game about trick-or-treating as an RPG. You play as a kid on Halloween whose sibling is kidnapped by candy-hungry monsters, and you fight them using the magical power of costumes — which transform you into their full-sized Halloween costume equivalents during battle. A cardboard robot costume becomes an actual giant robot. A unicorn becomes an actual unicorn. The concept generates unfailing comedy, and the writing has the gentle, autumnal sweetness of the best children’s films.
49. Monkey Island: Return to Monkey Island (2022)
Developer: Terrible Toybox | Platform: PC, Switch, Mobile
Ron Gilbert’s return to the franchise he created was a genuinely funny, genuinely moving late-career comeback. Guybrush Threepwood, now somewhat older and self-aware about his own legend, is as bumbling and lovable as ever — but the game’s humor now carries a layer of affectionate melancholy about nostalgia, fan expectations, and the nature of returning to beloved things. It’s funny in the way that only something made by someone who has thought very carefully about what they want to say can be.
50. Disco Elysium: The Final Cut (2021)
Developer: ZA/UM | Platform: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox, Switch
Returning to Disco Elysium one final time because The Final Cut’s added voice acting for Harry’s internal skill voices — particularly Electrochemistry, Shivers, and the Inland Empire — amplified the comedy of the original into something exceptional. Hearing Harry’s drug-addled chemistry skill encourage him to take something inadvisable in a completely cheerful voice, while his Empathy skill gently points out this is a terrible idea, is funnier than anything in most dedicated comedy games.
The cop drama set in a dying city written by a philosophy club from Estonia remains one of the strangest, most original, and funniest things ever made for any medium.
Final Thoughts
Comedy in games requires a specific kind of confidence — the willingness to commit to a joke completely, to trust the player will get it, and to make humor part of the game’s DNA rather than a decoration applied afterward. The games on this list all have that confidence in common.
Whether you prefer the literary wit of Grim Fandango, the anarchic chaos of Conker, the satirical precision of South Park: Stick of Truth, or the pure emergent lunacy of a goat being flung through the air by its own momentum — there’s something on this list for every type of comedy sensibility.
Start anywhere. Laugh often. The medium has more humor in it than most people realize.
FAQ: Funniest Video Games
What is the funniest video game ever made?
Portal 2 consistently tops polls and critical lists for comedy games, largely due to GLaDOS and Wheatley’s extraordinary writing. Grim Fandango and The Secret of Monkey Island are the standard-bearers for written comedy in gaming history. South Park: Stick of Truth is probably the funniest game of the 2010s. The honest answer is that it depends heavily on what type of humor you respond to.
Are funny games worth playing if I’m not usually a comedy fan?
Absolutely. Many of the games on this list — Portal 2, Hades, Night in the Woods, Yakuza 0 — are also excellent games by any other measure. The comedy enhances rather than replaces gameplay, writing, and world design that would be compelling even without the jokes.
What is the best comedy adventure game?
The Monkey Island series and Grim Fandango set the standard for the genre and have never been surpassed in terms of pure writing quality. The Stanley Parable is the best comedy game of the indie era. Disco Elysium is in a category of its own.
Are there funny games for kids?
The Ratchet & Clank series, Lego games, WarioWare, and Costume Quest are all genuinely funny games appropriate for younger players. The humor works for adults too, which is rare and valuable.
What was the first video game to be intentionally funny?
The text adventure Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1984) — co-designed by Douglas Adams himself — is one of the earliest examples of genuinely funny video game writing. The LucasArts adventure game library, beginning with Maniac Mansion in 1987, established the template for comedy game writing that most subsequent entries built on.
Do funny games have good stories?
Many of the best ones do. Grim Fandango, Disco Elysium, Night in the Woods, Yakuza 0, and Hades all have compelling narratives that the comedy serves rather than undercuts. Humor and emotional depth are not mutually exclusive — in the best cases, they amplify each other.
