The Sword and Laser discussion

Maybe even the darkest comedy in any medium

It's not comedy like Pratchett or Adams. It has humour in it, but the situation and setting is serious.

It's gallows humour. If it didn't have the humour it would be way too dark.

If you think about what humanity is going through, it is, literally, hell on, and under, Earth.

Tassie Dave wrote: "It's not comedy like Pratchett."

I don't know. I think the point of Pratchett isn't the humor - he uses the humor to illuminate something absurd in our culture. Vimes is especially good at this - like how in Jingo he points out that to a decent cop's brain war is just a crime, when everyone else sees killing in that context as something entirely different.

With Dungeon Crawler Carl, it seems to me like the point is the jokes. And there's lots of jokes. It's too heavy-handed in it's treatment of stuff like the 'glurp glurp' show to make anyone actually think about it. The stuff that is pointed out as 'bad' is so self-evidently bad that the point of the book can't be something serious - the point is the jokes.

Christos wrote: "Maybe even the darkest comedy in any medium"

Have you not seen Eating Raoul?

I’ll add to list

This book has a premise that is both completely bonkers and incredibly bleak. It's kind of a mashup between The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and recent S&L pick The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

Not only is the Earth basically destroyed by aliens in the first chapter, the surviving humans must fight to survive and also perform for the entertainment of their galactic overlords. The satire of reality television, talk shows, and social media is very broad, as is some of the social commentary (like the (view spoiler)[ boss monster who's a parody of a 'Karen' (hide spoiler)]).

But I think there are some subtler touches as well, like the undertone of sexual objectification. Carl is initially going round the dungeon in his boxer shorts, with bare feet, and he gets (view spoiler)[ leered over by the foot-fetishist AI and given items like an enchanted pedicure kit and the heart-patterned boxers seen on the cover illustration (which incidentally is inaccurate as he's shown in his first dungeon encounter, running from the goblin murder dozer, while wearing those boxers, but in fact he doesn't receive them until later in the book #nitpick). Then later, there's a deepfake porno video that goes viral. All this is played for laughs, but there's an underlying sense of exploitation -- Carl is really grossed out by it all, but he feels forced into playing along with it in order to survive. (hide spoiler)]

Anyway, I can see why this book has been such a viral sensation - it's funny and fast-paced, but there's some depth here too, and I'm not just talking about the dungeon levels.

His Kaiju: Battlefield Surgeon is much darker. Also a good very unique story, but reading it you can easily see a lot of the ideas behind DCC developing.

Ruth wrote: All this is played for laughs, but there's an underlying sense of exploitation"

I feel like this is a good way to describe the videogame industry, which is part of what's being satirized here. I'm not an insider, but the culture of big game companies seems to consist appealing to worker's 'toughness' to get them to work long hours of crunch, and of being sexist (and other 'ists') and then accusing victims of not being able to take a joke.

At least Carl has some sense of justice which helps set him apart from the world of the game.