Nintendo’s Greatest Trick Was Turning Mario Into Comedy Gold

Nintendo’s final major release of 2024 is a Mario game that shouldn’t exist. Revealed a mere four months ago, Mario & Luigi: Brothership is a new Switch installment in a series that was presumed dead for five years—a spinoff line that dates back decades, encompassing a couple of stone-cold classic games and a few more divisive ones. Mixed reviews indicate that Brothership might not be the grand return to form fans hoped for, but it is a capper to a quietly unusual year for Mario games that has highlighted one of the most underappreciated aspects of the numerous releases starring the famous mascot: Some of them are really damn funny.

I strongly suspect that this isn’t common knowledge, at least not in the way that I mean it. Yes, it is funny that Mario, a cartoon caricature of an Italian plumber, continues to exist and has been featured in just about every kind of video game, a strange television show, a notorious boondoggle of a movie, and a massive blockbuster one. And yes, it’s also amusing that all of this hullabaloo is supported by primary texts that, despite the tremendous leaps and bounds of technology fueling them, still revolve around a mustachioed man with impossibly big ups and a voice that, had it debuted today, would probably inspire violence.

The Mario & Luigi games, however, are a different sort of funny. Funny on their own merits, even. Beginning with the 2003 Game Boy Advance title Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, the series embraced the least Mario-like of video game genres—the role-playing game—with irreverent aplomb. Superstar Saga and its four DS and 3DS successors (plus a pair of remakes) struck the nigh-impossible balance of being involved enough to justify 20-odd hours of play, yet not so involved that we were suddenly taking the mushroom-headed guys too seriously or splitting hairs over Mario’s stat lines. After all, the games could never lose sight of Mario’s all-ages appeal.

Comedy was how the developers at Mario & Luigi studio AlphaDream threaded that needle, using jokes that bridged the gaps between genres and demographics. The broad slapstick of, say, Toad walking in on Mario in the shower and passing out, or Mario and Luigi’s dialogue rendering as Italian-inflected gibberish, played to the kids, while terminally online adults could screenshot Bowser saying, “Now all I need are my Baddies” and snicker. There was something for everyone.

But the last new entry in the Mario & Luigi series was 2015’s Mario & Luigi and Paper Mario crossover, Paper Jam, on the 3DS, and AlphaDream declared bankruptcy in 2019. Brothership arrives half a decade later courtesy of Acquire, a Japanese studio with an eclectic output. It also arrives six months after Nintendo’s remake of 2004’s Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, another Mario game known for laughs as much as for vintage Nintendo charm; a little less than a year after a remake of pioneering 1996 classic Super Mario RPG; and slightly more than a year after Super Mario Bros. Wonder, which brought emphatic kookiness to the plain old running and jumping Mario is famous for. Nintendo—a notoriously secretive company that mostly communicates via game releases and the occasional lawsuit—is getting back in touch with Mario’s funny bone.

Which is odd, because for a long time, the company wasn’t quite sure how to handle his humor.

Mario’s side hustle in comedy has its roots in one of the game industry’s great corporate divorces. For much of the ’90s, Nintendo and Square (now Square Enix) enjoyed one of the most exciting partnerships in the medium’s history. The arrangement was simple: Square made adored video games, including the Final Fantasy series, and Nintendo hosted them exclusively on its consoles.

The sticking point was the console that would become the Nintendo 64. Initial plans called for the new machine to play games on CD-ROMs, but higher-ups at Nintendo, preferring the responsiveness of cartridges and their lack of lengthy load times, scuttled that idea. Sony, which had partnered with Nintendo to develop an unreleased CD add-on for the Super NES, responded by forging ahead with its own console, the PlayStation, which was released in Japan in late 1994.

Enamored of the potential of games on CD, the developers at Square jumped ship, ditching their longtime platform partners at Nintendo in favor of Sony—and a string of massive critical and commercial hits, beginning with 1997’s Final Fantasy VII. But before Square and Nintendo parted ways, there was one last collab on the books set to come stateside.

Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars was, crucially, the first major Mario console game developed by an external studio. For the first time since players began platforming through the Mushroom Kingdom in 1985’s Super Mario Bros., another studio was interpreting the world created by Shigeru Miyamoto and others at Nintendo, in a genre that prioritized storytelling and characters over snappy acrobatics.

Mario didn’t need a makeover, but the fresh blood behind Super Mario RPG nonetheless unlocked new aspects of the character. Square’s team, led by game directors Yoshihiko Maekawa and Chihiro Fujioka, produced an adventure that was absolutely loaded with ideas and off-kilter humor. The studio’s solution to the problem of basing a story on a brand mascot who must effectively remain static was to make Mario the ultimate straight man. An unflappable cosmic force of nature, he gamely hops his way through a goofy world where he’s basically a rock star, but clueless about his status. (An early running joke involves multiple characters asking him to do his famous jump or not believing that he’s the Mario until he does.)

Square’s insight into Mario was that the guy didn’t really need fleshing out. It was better to overthink Mario’s surroundings and invite the player to do the same. As the last Mario game on the Super Nintendo, Super Mario RPG opened the door to a whole new World 1-1 of possibilities for the world’s most famous plumber—and then the dissolution of Square and Nintendo’s relationship nearly shut it down.

Fortunately, Nintendo realized what it had. Super Mario RPG would never get a sequel, but after a lull, its legacy would live on in two RPG-esque series: Paper Mario, which would be designed for consoles and was primarily developed by Fire Emblem creators Intelligent Systems, and Mario & Luigi, which AlphaDream (where Maekawa and Fujioka would soon set up shop) would develop for handhelds. Each series had a different approach—Paper Mario would experiment with gameplay, eventually inching away from RPG trappings, while Mario & Luigi would stay in the RPG lane, leaning into gimmicks built around controlling both brothers at once. But the two series seemed to agree with the fundamental revelation of Super Mario RPG: The best kind of Mario story was a funny one.

When you look at them from a thousand feet up, video games—especially the single-player kind—feature a fundamentally strange sort of interactivity. They’re built around a meeting of minds that can’t communicate directly, like a chess game played by mail in which neither participant knows whether their latest move was delivered. A player invites a game designer into their home; the designer, in turn, invites the player into their realm, which the player is equally welcome to respect or wreck. The chaos of a human mucking about in the machine is the point.

This makes video game protagonists an odd artistic device. They are the means by which designers establish rules and limits, the vessels through which players explore digital spaces. Over years and years of games that have established his elasticity, Mario has become the ultimate video game protagonist, a founding father of play. Want to race, paint, play basketball, or tee off on a bonkers course? Nintendo has made the most accessible version of that experience for you, and Mario’s mustachioed face is there to make you feel welcome, regardless of your gaming expertise.

Mario’s RPG series derive much of their comedy from needling Nintendo’s fine-tuned approach to play. They adopt the outsider perspective established by Square to slyly riff on the oddity of Mario’s enduring appeal. A recurring bit in the Paper Mario games involves the Goombas talking about their role as Mushroom Kingdom cannon fodder as if it’s a nine-to-five with terrible benefits. Other games delight in treating the sunshiny world of Mario with deadly seriousness. Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story opens with the severity of a Ken Burns documentary as it introduces players to “the blorbs,” an affliction that causes victims to inflate like balloons and roll around helplessly. And in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, just about every female-presenting character is down bad for Mario, and not a blessed soul cares about Luigi.

Taken as a whole, Mario RPGs are a bit of a commentary on the silliness of the video game protagonist and the artificial prominence the role bestows. The games are not subversive—the most “adult” writing in them involves the occasional randy line or surprisingly deadpan character, like the Thousand-Year Door NPC who introduces himself outside an arena by saying, “Me? Just a Lakitu who digs on combat sports, dude.” At their best, though, they are thoughtful about what it means to play video games and how funny it is to be considered the most important person in the world—while making that world infinitely more interesting than the character you play as.

It’s not as rare as it used to be to play a funny video game. Plenty of games make me laugh now—on purpose, even. Sega’s long-running Yakuza/Like a Dragon series is ostensibly a gangster soap opera, and a very good one, but at its heart it’s a Looney Tunes–esque masculine farce. Humor is not limited to story-heavy games, either: The chaos of a player character simply roaming around an otherwise ordered world is the comedic foundation of games like this year’s very British indie Thank Goodness You’re Here or the pandemic-era hit Untitled Goose Game.

Until recently, though, Mario’s comedy stylings had stalled. Fans of Mario RPGs are fond of the conspiratorial notion that Nintendo has mandated that the games be more conservative, and there is some evidence of that. Original characters have grown scarce, and modifying the designs of classic Mario creatures—for instance, by giving them goofy hairstyles or funny hats—is now verboten. Nintendo, to its credit, has historically been allergic to sequels that don’t diverge from their predecessors’ gameplay in significant ways, but that’s a tall order in the role-playing genre, where stories and characters are the coin of the realm and gameplay innovation is commonly considered a nice bonus.

As a result, even as some Mario games have continued to be quite funny, their attempts to stray from tradition—as in 2020’s Paper Mario: The Origami King, which dropped many of the trappings of traditional, turn-based RPGs—end up becoming a distraction, if not turning off players outright. Couple that with Nintendo’s neglect of many of its beloved classics that weren’t playable on Switch, and it was easy to believe that the company just wanted to move on.

That tide may be turning, in light of Superstar Saga’s addition to Nintendo Switch Online last year, the remakes of Super Mario RPG and The Thousand-Year Door, and now Brothership’s revival of Mario & Luigi. Nintendo being the opaque entity that it is, it’s hard to discern whether this recent activity signals genuine interest in the Mario joke machine or whether it’s merely a play for time—a means of keeping the public’s interest as the Switch winds down while holding off on revealing the system’s successor.

Of course, those who watch Nintendo’s movements closely have come to find the 135-year-old institution plenty funny on its own. You never know when the idiosyncratic company—which is quite clearly gearing up to unveil its new console—will simply opt to announce an alarm clock instead.

That’s a pretty good joke.

Joshua Rivera is a Philadelphia-based culture writer whose work has appeared in GQ, New York, Vanity Fair, Polygon, and others. You can follow him at @jmrivera02.