@Michael -
That’s the overall sense I was hoping to prod at - ‘jokes’ are one-offs that can’t carry along a story or build a world. It really is a form of highly stylized situational humour as you’ve said… I don’t understand how it didn’t last as a medium. I have Sam and Max Season 1, but the first episode left me somewhat disappointed with the forced situations. I think I’ll give the rest of the episodes a go this weekend and see if they manage to articulate the world a little bit. Comedy is damned hard. Thanks for the note.

As a great English actor once said on his deathbed: “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” The history of the medium has proved, in my view, that nowhere is comedy harder to achieve than in video games. It’s not about jokes. All the great comics and comedy writers have known this. It’s about situations. A joke is good for one laugh, then it’s time for another joke. A comedic situation can sustain itself almost indefinitely in the right hands. For some reason, game developers haven’t figured out how to do it. Day of the Tentacle is such a shining exception, one would think it might have pointed the way. But for some reason, it didn’t. I can only assume it’s much harder to achieve than I realize.