Humor, like horror, is hard to do in a game. Trying to “make it funny”, like trying to “make it scary” often comes off as forced and artificial. It’s only recently I’ve started getting the hang of the horror part of running a game, thanks mostly to having looked at Dungeons & Dragons, when I started running it, and realizing that the fantasy end is often played up to the detriment of the fact your character are going up against “shit that would turn you white!” to quote Winston Zedimore in Ghostbusters. I came at D&D fresh by wanting to make the monsters terrifying, not just a stat bloc to be reckoned with. Alien came later and even still getting the body horror is a bit difficult. (Weirdly, a one-off adventure in our Star Trek game a few years ago was more effective — probably because you don’t expect terrifying monsters in Star Trek.

Humor sort of naturally flows from gaming, especially if you’ve got a good group where everyone’s sense of humor meshes. There’s noting worse that the uptight scold or the truly weird bugger whose funny is dramatically different from everyone else’s.

There are a couple of games that were angled toward humor. There was the West End Games’ Ghostbusters RPG, which sought to make the setting and the humor the point of the game, but you can really develop rules for “being funny”. Similarly, there was Paranoia — another West End Games production. (I forgot how much they put out in the ’80s and ’90s!) Paranoia was supposed to be a tongue in cheek dystopia where your character was a clone who got killed off on a pretty regular basis thanks to their stupidity and the disfunction of the authoritarian, Computer-run city. I played Paranoia a few times, even with a good GM, and it just…didn’t click. It’s aiming for a Brazil quality of humor, and it either winds up being a “Who cares? Let’s see how stupid I can die” humor. (Weirdly, now, I’m thinking you run Paranoia seriously — as a god-awful dystopia and just let the humor evolve naturally.)

Still, there must be some kind of market for humor RPGs, there’s a “comedy RPG” page on DriveThruRPG.