Creator / Funhaus

''We're Funhaus! We play video games!''

Funhaus (pronounced "Funhouse"), is a division of Rooster Teeth that features members of the former Machinima.com division Inside Gaming. The channel focuses on both gaming news and gameplay, similar to The Know and Let's Play respectively.

Funhaus is based in the Los Angeles, California offices of Rooster Teeth Productions. The channel officially launched on February 16, 2015. With the disintegration of Machinima in early 2019, Rooster Teeth bought the Inside Gaming label, and the show now runs concurrently with Funhaus, starring the same (and original) cast ^note  as of 2021, Inside Gaming consists mainly of Brian Gaar after the rest of the cast joined Funhaus. ^note In essence, Funhaus is for more laid back content like Let's Plays and podcasts, while Inside Gaming is for more constructed content like news segments, features, and reviews. Since both channels are run out of the same building by the exact same people, Inside Gaming content will be listed here for the sake of convenience.

Funhaus produces many shows such as "Open Haus" (Q&A), "Art Haus" (a fanart showcase), "Filmhaus" (film discussion), "Funhaus Podcast" (a podcast, also formerly named Dude Soup), and gameplay series such as "Demo Disk" (gameplay of video game demos sent by fans) and "Wheelhaus" (gameplay of Steam games randomly chosen from a spinner). They even produced several comedy series, Arizona Circle, No Idea Ikea, and Last Laugh.

Core members include James Willems, Elyse Willems and Matt Peake. Members of the production team—Omar de Armas, Jacob Fullerton, Daniel Schneider, Don Casanova, Adam Brouillard, Ryan Hailey, Lindsey Washburn, John Holland, Jon Smith, Patrick Brown, Charlotte Avery, Rick Reveche, and Armando Torres—also make regular appearances. Former members include Sean "Spoole" Poole (who left in February 2016 to move to Seattle), Joel Rubin (who left in April 2016 to work at SourceFed), Bruce Greene (who left in September 2019), Lawrence Sonntag (who left in December 2019), Adam Kovic (let go October 2020), and Alanah Pearce (left in November 2020 to write for Sony, but remains a regular guest).

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Funhaus is an example of:

• The Alcoholic: Lawrence often paints himself as this in self-deprecating jokes.
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: Their drunk streams and gameplay videos. Their drunk gameplay of Chop after their Switch Sports drunk stream showed Jon crawling all over Ryan and nearly pissing his pants.
• Big "WHAT?!": Everyone's general reaction is either this or a wide-eyed Stunned Silence every time Ryan Hailey tells one of his wildly bizarre but true stories or really, anything he does.
• Black Comedy Rape: Among many other examples, Lawrence declares that he would name his hypothetical starship the Star Raper.
• Brief Accent Imitation: James will tend to do this when pretending to be one of the video game characters.
• Cloudcuckoolander: All seem to go off on strange tangents but Lawrence especially. After Lawrence and Jon's departures, Ryan Hailey seems to have assumed the role of resident oddball.
• Colbert Bump: Anything Funhaus cover ends up getting this treatment, such as Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K. 2, Dance! It's Your Stage and even the Rule 34 artists.
• Comedic Sociopathy: Mostly from James and Lawrence.
• Cop Show: The Machinimated scripted GTA police procedural.
• Couch Gag: Some.
  • The intro of Open Haus will always be erratic and different.
  • The case at the beginning of Demo Disk will have something different written on each time.
  • Lawrence's Dude Soup salutation will be always appropriate to the episode's topic.
• Darker and Edgier: Imagine Achievement Hunter, or the rest of Rooster Teeth by that matter, without any awareness on political correctness, self depreciation, or offensiveness radar.
• D.I.Y. Disaster: Played for Laughs with No Idea Ikea, with James and Adam attempting to assemble IKEA furniture without instructions and other obstacles, such as building with oven mitts on or building blindfolded.
• Enemy Mine: They may be rivals with Achievement Hunter, but they'll team up to take out Lannan Eacott because he's Australian.

• Expository Theme Tune: Bruce sings one as part of a Credits Gag at the end of a GTA race video explaining what Funhaus do and giving each member a character trait.
  Bruce:"And something else about Elyse."
• Freudian Trio: The regular game team forms one with James as the Id, Adam as the Superego, and Bruce as the Ego.
• Friendly Rival: To Achievement Hunter. The two divisions often insult each other in videos, but also occasionally guest in each other's programming and are fairly friendly outside of work. Their fanbases on the other hand...
• Fuzz Therapy: Benson was originally trained as a therapy dog and will rush to anyone who seems scared, especially Elyse, during gameplay.
• Gender Lift: Elyse receives two WWE avatars, one female and one male so that she can participate in a Battle Royale against the rest of the crew.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Lawrence deliberately plays this up, especially during the comment show.
• Hacking Minigame: The "Time to Hack" splashcard appears when the gang encounters one in their gameplays.
• Helpless with Laughter:
  • In the Inside Gaming video "HARRY POTTER in GTA 4!" the crew try out the eponymous GTA 4 mod, in which Nico is replaced by Harry Potter complete with magic and a broomstick, plus Voldemort homies and Sackboy pedestrians. Very early on, the players get on the bad side of one such pedestrian, resulting in the Sackboy wrestling Harry off his broomstick - only to be shot by Voldemort, triggering an all-out brawl. Throughout all of this, the Inside Gaming crew are laughing too hard to continue playing, leaving Harry standing meekly in the street as the carnage plays out around him. Eventually, John gasps, "I just farted from laughing!"
  • Another clip from the Inside Gaming era, "Hardest Motorcycle Race Ever" features Bruce repeatedly failing to get his ATV up the first few ramps and breaking down in gales of wheezing laughter. As the mistakes stack up, Bruce can only laugh harder and harder, and his performance declines accordingly, much to the amusement of James and Adam.
    Bruce: [gasping for air] You know how hard it is to play laughing this hard?!
  • In the GTA 5 gameplay video "Just F*ckin Around", Lawrence repeatedly trolls Adam by ramming him off the road with a semitrailer so he won't be able to get back to his apartment and start the next mission. By the end of this, Adam is literally sobbing with laughter and almost unable to play because his eyes are watering so badly that he can't see the screen.
  • During their examination of Last FM, Adam, Bruce and James discover the word "scrobble," and are reduced to such a fit of helpless laughter that they struggle to make jokes on the subject. At one point, subtitles have to be deployed just to make sense of what Bruce is saying.
  • In their playthrough of GTA 5 adversary mode "Condemned", the eponymous villain (AKA Spookums) becomes such a Memetic Loser to the team that they end up turning the tables and hunting him down instead, to the point that the only reason why Spookums can score any kind of victory at all is because the players are laughing too hard to concentrate. This comes to a head in "Kill Or Be Killed", when - after ganging up on Spookums and stabbing him to death in his most humiliating demise yet - Adam, Bruce, James, and Lawrence have to stop playing and just laugh for the next ten seconds because they literally can't focus on anything else.
  • A bug in Sail And Sacrifice results in the player character randomly levitating into the sky while attempting to climb a ladder, leaving Adam and the others laughing too hard to continue playing.
  • The Gun playthrough in "Ride 'Til You Die" features a moment when - in the middle of a massive shootout in the desert - an unarmed man casually wanders into the line of fire as if nothing could be possibly wrong, and is promptly shot dead. Play promptly grinds to a halt as the entire crew cracks up, and Adam is forced to pause the game while they recover.
  • In "Sunder Pressure," Jon is discussing the concept of swingers parties over the course of a game of Sundered when he points out that the hosts have to have a four-bedroom house - meaning that they have to "have a bunch of kids." Cue everyone asking "why do they have to have kids?" As Jon futilely tries to explain that the kids don't actually have to be at the party, Alanah, Jacob, and Rahul all facepalm and dissolve into helpless giggles, resulting in a game over.
• The Hyena: Bruce will usually be the first to break down in wheezing laughter during gameplay.
• Incredibly Lame Pun: The water based puns during the CSI Demo Disk.
  • Also the porn parody names the gang come up with for X-Men, Harry Potter, Tom Hanks films, etc.
• Jerk Jock: Their interpretation of the warrior, "Volkor" in the game Warlords Battlecry II.
  • James himself tends to enjoy playing the part to ridiculous extremes.
• Last-Name Basis: Peake.
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again: All former and current members have repeated that they will not discuss the circumstances surrounding Adam's departure. One did explain that this is done not to protect Adam, but other people affected.
• Mockumentary: As part of Rooster Teeth's 20th anniversary, "The Untold Story of Funhaus" is an origin story of how James, Patrick, Lindsey, and Jacob Sr. created Funhaus.
• Oh, Crap!: Bruce reverts to this face so frequently that there are multiple video compilations of it.
• Oh, Crap, There Are Fanfics of Us!: They featured a selection of lines from various fanfics during an Open Haus. They also asked for the audience to write them a fanfic of Fun Haus.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Sean "Spoole" Poole
• Overreacting Airport Security: Bruce tells a story about he was almost kicked off a plane for boarding too early.
• Parallel Porn Title: The gang get a lot of comedic mileage thinking up Incredibly Lame Pun names for porn parody versions of Toy Story, Lord of the Rings, Goosebumps, Star Wars, etc.
• Perfection Is Static: Played for laughs in one video from the team's Inside Gaming days; here, during a playthrough of A-Train 8, Adam, Bruce, and James go completely Off the Rails by bulldozing over all the buildings to make way for new tracks, and joke that this is the work of a supervillain called the Conductor. By the end of the Conductor's reign of terror, all signs of civilization have been obliterated except for tracks that don't lead anywhere, with all the trains unable to move anywhere because the tracks behind them have been bulldozed as well.
  Bruce: All the trains in town will never move!
  James: Beautiful! Frozen in time! [...] I HAVE CREATED A UTOPIA!
  Adam: No gods, no kings, only trains!
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: Because Alanah is Australian and is much younger than the rest of the crew, she doesn't understand the 80s and 90s references the others make, like not knowing who Jim Henson was, much to Elyse's horror.
• Prank Call: Bruce and James have called the phone numbers found on the packaging of decades old demo disks; usually they are redirected to customer support desks (for larger companies that bought the now-defunct game studio) or to telemarketers to whom the line is redirected. They often ask for advice on how to make the defective software from the early 2000s function on a modern computer, much to the bewilderment of the person on the other end.
  • One time, the number on the package was for somebody's personal voicemail box, so James left a heartfelt thank-you message for the developer. Bruce later received a voicemail back from the very confused but thankful developer.
• Race Lift: Lawrence's WWE persona, Lawrence Sakamoto is at least partially Japanese, sporting a slightly darker skin tone in addition to his Japanese surname.
  • Bruce's WWE persona is Ambiguously Brown and dresses in a Native American styled costume, due to Bruce stating he has Native American ancestry in a previous video.
• Refuge in Audacity: James especially. They go into some pretty terrible conversations.
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor: Adam left in October 2020, after inappropriate photos of him in the offices were leaked.
• Rule34: Occasionally when waiting for games to load they'll look up Rule 34 relating to a movie or show. Example Rule 34 Rugrats. This would later become a mainstay of Demo Disk, and censored Rule 34 images even serve as thumbnails for Demo Disk videos.
  • And they're quite aware that there's Rule 34 of themselves as well. Lawrence has even asked the fanbase for some. During one Demo Disk they even stumbled upon a photoshop of Adam.
• Running Gag:
  • The first episode of Demo Disk, Bruce snapped one of the disks, and now every disk must be snapped. After transitioning to Xbox 360 demos, this adjusted to Jon coming up with outlandish and slightly dangerous ways to break disks (since for whatever reason 360 disks are difficult to break barehanded). In a perfect display of escalation, one episode simply sent the disks to Achievement Hunter.
  • With increasing frequency, Bruce will state "We can show that" in regards to an image that's been censored in the post-edit.
  • Them extolling or mentioning they're doing steroids. A fan made multiple compilations of this gag.
• Seinfeldian Conversation: Russian Gay Clubs.
  • Really, half the appeal of the show. Lawrence even mentions that all they ever end up talking about are movies during one of the drunk gameplay videos.
• Self-Deprecation
• Sketch Comedy:
  • Their Arizona Circle project, which consists on a pilot special and a full season.
  • The Funhaus Public Broadcasting specials, which are parodies of public access television and shopping networks.
• Stunned Silence: Everyone's general reaction is either this or Big "WHAT?!" whenever Ryan shares one of his very bizarre but true stories that have happened to him.
• Team Pet:
  • Benson, the resident lovable and lupus-infected dog. Specifically James and Elyse's pet, who spent a lot of time roaming the office comforting stressed crew members. He also replaces the MGM Lion in the Funhaus Theater Mode titlecard.
  • Ever since the team started working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they occasionally mention their pets in videos, even releasing a montage introducing their pets. Jacob's cat in particular, likes interrupting him when he's on Model Employees. Lindsey's dog likes to lounge around in the office since their return to the office in 2021-2022.
• Tough Room: The concept behind Last Laugh is that everyone tries to make each other laugh within a set time limit.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: They're pretty mean to each other, but most of this is an act for comedy.
• Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: Given their content and tone, they're uncomfortable with minors being fans.

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