Milner, Ryan, and Whitney Phillips. 2017. The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online. Cambridge: Polity Press. According to Linda Hutcheon, parody is “repetition with critical distance, which marks difference rather than similarity” (1985/ 2000, 6). Pastiche, on the other hand, derives “its comic effect [by relying] on its resemblance to its ‘hypotext’ rather than on transformation of content or context” (Tran-Gervat 2014, 555). In the present case study, this process is already visible in the similarity between the games’ titles where, by altering only one letter (the replacement of “n” with a second “d”), the original game’s title shifts from one that is merely descriptive to one that is in itself a crass, sexualised joke. radical formalism” is a deeply humanist approach to media texts that reads for affective and, increasingly, ethical expressions within the aesthetic, material, and narrative forms of media objects themselves (see Brinkema 2014, 2016, Anger and Jirsa 2019). This contribution focuses on the game Uddertale (2016), developed by the artist Doxy for The Poundry, a young distributor of online sex games. As its title suggests, Uddertale, is a spoof of the indie hit Undertale (Fox 2015), an adventure role-playing game which received numerous accolades for its originality and humour. In this chapter, I pay attention, firstly, to the parodic and pastiche aspects of Uddertale’s relationship to Undertale. Secondly, I focus on the palimpsestic web that connects the two games to the 1999 film American Pie. Through this analysis, I ask how gamic parodic humour comes to differ from other forms of video game humour, or parodic humour at large, when it becomes part of the greater intermedial agenda of translating, adapting, or transforming an existing game into a playable pornographic object. Ultimately, this double case study allows me to highlight an especially troubling aspect of humour in general: its ability to maintain contradictory ethical positions in suspension, with no resolution in sight. Keywords

Pixelated Noose. 2018. Toby Fox Camp Fangamer Interview July 2015 (Part 1). YouTube Video, 10:00, March 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwampY_jIdg. Ngai, Sianne. 2012. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Paasonen, Susanna. 2019. Monstrous Resonance: Affect and Animated Pornography. In How to Do Things with Affects: Affective Triggers in Aesthetic Forms and Cultural Practices, ed. Ernst van Alphen and Tomáš Jirsa, 143–162. Amsterdam: Brill. Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Language and Art. New York: Columbia University Press.

Hutcheon, Linda. 2000 [1985]. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Booth, Paul. 2014. Slash and Porn: Media Subversion, Hyper-articulation, and Parody. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 28 (3): 396–409. Tran-Gervat, Yen-Mai. 2014. Pastiche. In Encyclopedia of Humor, ed. Salvatore Attardo, 554–556. Los Angeles, London, et al.: Sage Publications.

Anger, Jiří, and Tomáš Jirsa. 2019. We Never Took Deconstruction Seriously Enough (On Affects, Formalism, and Film Theory): An Interview with Eugenie Brinkema. Illuminace 31 (1): 65–85. Toriel’s butterscotch-cinnamon pie is one of many direct importations from Undertale, so is the entirety of Toriel’s house, the layout of rooms, and much of the dialogue, including the general tonality of exchanges as well as the game’s overarching narrative: Toriel has rescued the fallen child who is searching for a way to escape her care. Violence and the Diagram; Or, The Human Centipede. Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 24 (2): 75–108. Ruberg, Bonnie. 2018. Straightwashing Undertale: Video Games and the Limits of LGBTQ Representation. Transformative Works and Cultures 28. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2018.1516.