Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone, Tomasz Z. Majkowski & Jaroslav Švelch, eds., Video Games and Comedy, Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

Presentation of the book

Video Games and Comedy is the first edited volume to explore the intersections between comedy and video games. This pioneering book collects chapters from a diverse group of scholars, covering a wide range of approaches and examining the relationship between video games, humour, and comedy from many different angles. The first section of the book includes chapters that engage with theories of comedy and humour, adapting them to the specifics of the video game medium. The second section explores humour in the contexts, cultures, and communities that give rise to and spring up around video games, focusing on phenomena such as in-jokes, player self-reflexivity, and player/fan creativity. The third section offers case studies of individual games or game series, exploring the use of irony as well as sexual and racial humour in video games.

Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone is Visiting Senior Lecturer at the University of Malta, and a Research Fellow with the University of Kent, UK. She has written extensively on comedy, including comedy in video games. 

Tomasz Z. Majkowski is Associate Professor at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, where he teaches and researches games, the carnivalesque and popular culture among other areas. 

Jaroslav Švelch is Assistant Professor of media studies at Charles University, Prague, the Czech Republic. A media scholar and linguist by training, his research focuses on game history, humour in video games, and video game monsters. He is the author of Gaming the Iron Curtain (2018), a history of computer gaming in 1980s Czechoslovakia. 

Table of contents

• Front Matter
• Ludo-Comedic Consonance: An Introduction to Video Games and Comedy – Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone, Tomasz Z. Majkowski, Jaroslav Švelch