By Lauren GonzalezDesign by Marty Smith Trying to be funny is like driving a car. Everybody does it, and we don’t think about how dangerous it is until something goes wrong. Bad humor doesn’t end lives, but it can kill your chances of getting a date or selling the video game you convinced at least 10 companies to invest in. One of the trickier aspects of engineering humor is that on one hand, people’s ideas about what’s actually funny change with the times. Would Reservoir Dogs or Booty Call be even remotely funny to your grandmother? Likewise, if you’re younger than 40, is there any reason to believe Bob Hope’s comedy sketches would make you laugh? On the other hand, some of the best humor is timeless. Monty Python’s The Life of Brian and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb are older than a good percentage of GameSpot’s readers, and yet their humor still works today. What we’ve learned from talking with two game designers (including Double Fine’s Tim Shafer), a game industry executive, a comic store owner, a game writer, and a Hollywood game agent is that creating amusing characters and scenarios…