Humor has never quite been an exact science. Like, actual scientists still don’t completely understand what triggers the laughter response in human beings. What we do know is thathumor comes in a lot of distinct flavors, some classy, some… less so.
Dark, crass, and otherwise inappropriate humor has been around for just as long as anything else that makes us laugh. Behaviors and events that would normally be considered abhorrent can be hilarious if presented in the right context.
Top 10 Dark Humor Anime
Humor is the spice of life, and anime that celebrates dark humor can be incredibly entertaining.
As with anything else, video games are so strangers to this form of humor, throwing excrement at our faces, implying raunchy situations, and just generally inflicting harm on people who may or may not deserve it. There are plenty of games out there that get crass with it, but these are our favorites.
Where Gettin’ Sloshed Gets You
Conker’s Bad Fur Day
In the late 90s and early 2000s,cartoony mascot platformerswere the polar opposite of ultraviolet games like Mortal Kombat. They were cute and wholesome, perfect for the kids. Despite being a cartoon mascot, though, Conker is not cute and definitely not wholesome, as illustrated in his N64 solo debut,Conker’s Bad Fur Day.
Conker’s Bad Fur Day kicks off with the titular squirrel getting blackout drunk, and only escalates from there. In just the first couple of hours, you gun down wasps with a machine gun turret, feed a mouse cheese until he explodes in a shower of gore, and urinate on a bunch of flaming imps.
Things really get dark when you get to the war section, which is a big reference to the film Saving Private Ryan. A particularly noteworthy moment is when Conker tries to free a soldier strapped to an electric chair, flips the wrong switch, and fries his eyeballs out of his head. Again, though, these are all cartoony squirrels, so it’s still pretty funny.
9South Park: The Stick Of Truth
Classically Crass
South Park: The Stick of Truth
When it comes to crass, bad-mannered humor, no one does it like South Park. Since 1997, this paper cutout series has pushed just about every boundary of television standards with its rude, crude vibes. Naturally, those same vibes extend toits most ambitious game,South Park: The Stick of Truth.
You play as a New Kid who’s just moved to the titular town while the neighborhood kids are embroiled in an epic game of fantasy make-believe.
It sounds innocent enough, but you’re soon embroiled in all kinds of M-rated shenanigans,from beating up drug dealers to battling underpants gnomes under your parents’ swinging genitalia.
Here’s the most concise example: one of the game’s bosses is an aborted fetus revived as a Nazi zombie, which screams actual quotes from Adolf Hitler. After you kill it, you can fart on its corpse to get an achievement titled “Too Far.”
We All Have Those Days
For those too young to know, referring to an angry, violent person as “going postal” harkens back to a series of incidents in the 80s and 90s where disgruntled postal service workers killed their coworkers and random bystanders. In real life, it’s definitely not funny, moreso these days, but I suppose if you’re deliberately trying to make the most offensive game possible, it’s perfect.
That was the mission statement of the Postal series of games, the most well-known being Postal 2.What starts as a checklist of daily chores turns into a cavalcade of senseless violence and cruelty.There are technically peaceful solutions to most of your headaches, but the game not-too-subtly encourages you to just whip out a shotgun and go nuts.
Some highlights include the ability to unzip your fly and urinate on anything, zombies with Tourette Syndrome cursing at you, and gunning down police officers while standing back-to-back with Gary Coleman. Seriously, Gary Coleman actuallylent his voice and likeness to this game.
7The Binding Of Isaac: Rebirth
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth
Anyone with an interest in the history of humor is probably familiar with the concept of the “dead baby joke.” It’s the kind of thing that feels like it shouldn’t be okay to make cracks about, but that’s precisely why it’s funny. That’s largely the kind of humor that drives The Binding of Isaac, as well as its improved remake,The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth.
The premise of The Binding of Isaac, that beinga naked toddler trying to escape his homicidal mother in a basement full of demons, is so patently absurd that it loops back around to being funny. Once you take the initial hook for granted, the various horrible things that happen to Isaac wheneveryou find a new power-upare pretty much just more of the same vibe.
The game is also absolutely covered in fecal matter, which isn’t necessarily dark on its own, but it does take on certain connotations when you remember that Isaac had been living in squalor prior to the game’s story.
6Borderlands 2
It’s A Whole Planet Of Jerks
Borderlands 2
As established in the first Borderlands game,the planet of Pandorais not a nice place. Both the flora and fauna are naturally hostile to all living things, and the majority of the planet’s human residents are insane bandits. However,Borderlands 2is when the series started playing all of this more for laughs.
A major contributing factor to this is the introduction ofyour nemesis, Handsome Jack, who is not shy about reveling in his love of violence and loathing of Vault Hunters. At multiple points throughout the campaign, he’ll call you up just to talk smack, sarcastically playing a violin after killing Mordecai’s bird or assigning you a quest to just walk off a cliff and kill yourself.
Even outside of Jack, the game’s many other factions are fountains of amusing sociopathy. There’s an entire sidequest wherein a single, random bandit will scream to the high heavens, begging you to shoot him in the face and rewarding you for doing so. His name is Face McShooty.
Duct Tape Makes Everything Better
Dead Rising 2
Zombie apocalypses have become the setting for some of the most heartfelt, emotional stories of the modern era, forcing us to confront our own humanity in the face of our loved ones rising as monsters. It’s also a bit of an inherently silly concept, though, and ripe for all kinds of mass-murder shenanigans without the moral hangups.
The originalDead Risinghad plenty of opportunities for zombie-related hi-jinks, but Dead Rising 2 is when the series went full tongue-in-cheek. Theintroduction of combo weapons, various random objects stitched into implements of double-death with duct tape,makes traversing a zombie horde less about surviving and more about how entertaining you can make it for yourself.
Whatever Happened To Dead Rising?
Sure seems to be dead, not too sure on the rising.
What makes this particularly amusing is that the mistreatment of the undead is actually a major plot point, with the protagonist, Chuck Greene, competing in a game show that involves killing zombies in the most showy way possible. Even with his own hangups, he never hesitates to strap on a moose head and run through a shambling crowd.
4Destroy All Humans!
You Know Where The Probe’s Going
Destroy All Humans!
A lot of classic alien invasion films were released during the Cold War, which is why a lot of them are just transparent propaganda. When you realize that, they seem pretty silly, which is why the wayDestroy All Humanscranks it to its logical conclusion is so entertaining.
The game’s protagonist, Cryptosporidium-137, is willing and capable of committing every atrocity those propaganda films ever screamed about. He kidnaps and mutilates cattle, fries innocents with his Disintegrator Ray, trashes towns with his flying saucer, and much more. Also, he sounds like Jack Nicholson, which is just kind of funny on its own.
This is compounded by the exaggerated, stereotypical way in which the humans are portrayed. They’re all stereotypes of Cold War-era Americans: aggressively patriotic and not particularly bright. Some of the humor has only gotten more crass over the years, which is why the remake of the first game actually has a content warning when you start it.
3Monster Prom
Be Your Worst Self
Monster Prom
High school is a place of personal growth and experimentation, a place to learn more about the person you’ll become as an adult. It can also be a place of gleeful cruelty and hedonism, and that’s in anormalhigh school. InMonster Prom, where your school is populated by monster people, things are going to reach absurd levels of inappropriate.
The central conceit of the game is making the right social choices to woo one of your classmates for prom. This sounds harmless enough, except that these choices are always made in ridiculous, dangerous situations.
You can convince your football-playing friend to recruit a truck to his team to run down opponents,trick a rival into jumping high enough on a trampoline to get sucked into a jet engine, and start a school cult.
Even outside the violence, there are a lot of other forms of promiscuous behavior, from rampant recreational drug use to bizarre sexual escapades. Don’t worry, everyone at this school is over 21, so it’s technically fine. Technically.
2Cult Of The Lamb
Make Friends And Influence People
Cult of the Lamb
The idea of being trapped in a cult and forced into poor conditions and bizarre rituals can be very frightening, especially for people who have actually lived through such conditions. The idea of being inchargeof a cult, though, one with actual, tangible demonic backing, is a much more appealing prospect. You’re not the one wearing rags and eating poop, after all.
InCult of the Lamb, you are encouraged to take the best possible care of your cultic flock as you may, but that doesn’t stop the occasional bit of dark nonsense from slipping in. For instance,your cultists will occasionally make random requests of you, ranging from something sensible like materials to literally asking you straight-up to feed them a bowl of poop.
There are always more cultists to recruit, so if you feel so inclined, you can do pretty much whatever horrid nonsense you want to them. Wanna put one in the stockade for being rude? Go for it. Wanna sacrifice one to a tangle of Eldritch tentacles? Sure, why not. Pit two of them against each other in gladiatorial combat? Well, what else is there to watch?
1Another Crab’s Treasure
Life Full Of Plastic
Another Crab’s Treasure
The prevalence of plastic waste in the world’s oceans is a very real problem that’s endangering various natural habitats and the sea creatures that live there. It could be said to be a good representation of how humans ruin sealife, which Another Crab’s Treasure shows in a more literal and amusingly cynical sense.
In this game, the entire seafloor is covered in trash, which the populace have not just adapted to, but revel in.Despite how the plastic is obviously hurting and sickening everyone, you still see crabs bragging about how cool their new accessories areand how much more trash they’ve accumulated than everyone else.
Perhaps one of the best sight gags in the entire game is when our protagonist, Kril, gets all his friends sent to the bottom of a trench in search of treasure. He finds the treasure, a chest full of millions of dollars, but it’s declared worthless because paper is the most flimsy and useless kind of trash.
8 Horror Games So Bad They’re Funny
Some horror games are so bad they’re actually hilarious. From terrible voice acting to broken mechanics, here are the funniest horror game fails.
