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

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 humourous characters. Among those, Wheatley, the robotic sphere, stands out both as the only British-speaking character and the most consistently recurring comedic relief throughout the game. Considering the success of Wheatley’s voice actor, Stephen Merchant, as well as his past as stand-up comedian and his return to the stage after the game release, 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 and relevant research on the polysemiotic nature of the videoludic text, following through with observations on videogame and humour translation. Merchant characterized Wheatley’s voice with erratic speech patterns and other features that are mostly exclusive to oral dialogue, therefore the analysis inquires on the way oral-specific features of the characters have been rendered in the Italian subtitling of the text, with particular attention to translation and subtitling choices that are non-compliant with the norms of subtitling practice in professional audiovisual translation. The study concludes with remarks on the strategies employed in translating the humorous utterances of the character throughout the first half of the videogame.