Stuttering humour in Portal 2: subtitling stand-up inspired jokes in videogame dialogue

Giovanni Raffa

Sapienza Università di Roma, University of Silesia in Katowice

Keywords: humor, video games, stand-up comedy

Portal 2 (2011) was a success in the videogame world and turned into a critical darling across the years. The premise of a dystopian and tragic futuristic sci-fi setting was craftly paired with charismatic and humorous characters. Among those, Wheatley stands out both as the only British-speaking character and the most consistent comic relief throughout the game. Considering the success of Wheatley’s voice actor, as well as his stand-up career, the links and influences between the stand-up comedy world and the humorous content in videogames are to be considered a relevant stage for the development of the field. By focusing on Portal 2 as a case study, this study addresses the textual structure of humour delivery in the videogame through original theory on joke structure in stand-up comedy, following through with qualitative observations on the videogame, its Italian subtitling, and the value of capitalisation as a subtitling tool for the purpose of humour translation.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Giovanni Raffa

Giovanni Raffa is a PhD student at the University of Rome La Sapienza, in a cotutelle with the University of Silesia in Katowice. His doctoral dissertation focuses on contemporary stand-up comedy performances as audiovisual texts and their Italian subtitling. He is a collaborator for the research project SL@VT. His research interests include humour theory, audiovisual translation and semiotics of non-traditional audiovisual texts.

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