Game of Thrones is not without funny characters and meme-able moments, but you might be surprised with just how dang funny and delightful A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
Without giving too much away, the show, a spin-off set 100 years before the OG series based on a series of George R. R. Martin novellas, delivers punchlines and editing choices that might remind you more of Family Guy than Game of Thrones. At round table interviews as part of New York Comic-Con 2025, A Knight Of the Seven Kingdoms’ showrunner Ira Parker and star Peter Claffey, who plays Ser Duncan the Tall a.k.a. “Dunk,” talked about how funny the show is and how they maintained that tone in a Westerosi environment.
For Claffey, a former professional Rugby player and alum of both Bad Sisters and Vikings: Valhalla, a love of/desire to make comedy is part of what brought him to performing. “When I finished playing rugby and kind of went into this and tried to go full hog into this,” he said, “I started by writing a lot of sketch comedy stuff, and I really enjoyed it.” This show leans into comedic moments and opt for comedic takes on moments that Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon wouldn’t necessarily choose. There aren’t just comic relief characters, like Tyrion Lannister or The Hound. Everyone on this show is funny, from Claffey himself to Dexter Sol Ansell as Egg and Daniel Ings as Ser Lyonel Baratheon.
“I think because of writing the sketch comedy, filming different skits and stuff like that I was honing the craft slightly in order to play those comedic beats, and I was quite glad that I had that in the artillery to then take a scene and have a discussion with Ira or have a discussion with [directors Owen Harris and Sarah Adina Smith] and say how can we make this that sort of theme that we wanted.”
That does not mean that the show isn’t dark at times.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is as violent, action-packed, and grotesque as you’d expect regardless. It’s still Westeros, after all. There are still ambitious characters, cruel characters, and a morbid aversion to telling morally black and white stories. However, Claffey continued, “you can find so much comedy from terrible situations.” It’s one of his favorite kinds of comedy. “I’m an enormous fan of Ari Aster and Robert Eggers,” he said, “and Ari Aster especially has developed this genre of nightmare comedy where you find yourself horrified but also laughing your head off. Movies like [Kristoffer Borgli’s] Dream Scenario, and I really loved [Aster’s] Beau is Afraid. I do think when the stakes are so high in this series that we’ve shot, there are moments to take a breath away. When we watched it back it was nice to see those things. Hopefully everybody feels like we pulled it off.”
Parker, who is also a writer on House of the Dragon, reiterated that it’s important the show still look and feel like Game of Thrones. “People like sitting in Westeros” and pretending the fantasy world is be real, he said, so any comedy has to have a subtle touch so as not to disrupt the “gritty, grimy, Earth-” world Martin created. “Certainly in our shooting of the show we wanted to be as faithful as as classic and we didn’t want to be too stylized in the camera movements and the way that it was shot,” said Parker. “We wanted people to feel like this was a world that they recognized but then also start giving subtle nods to, you know, we’re gonna try and do a little something different with our storytelling.”
The biggest difference between this show and the shows in this universe we’ve seen before is that it has a singular perspective. This is entirely Dunk’s story. If he’s not in the scene, we don’t see the scene. So, as Parker explained, the comedy was a way to sneak in backstory and not bore the audience. (Remember how Game of Thrones used to do that with sex scenes so much that people started calling it sexposition? Different times…)
“So obviously, very early on, letting people know with the slaps and the cutaways,” Parker continued, referencing a gag in the show’s pilot as Dunk thinks back to the abuse he endured as a squire. “Dunk is standing at that graveside thinking about the good and the bad. He has such a conflicted relationship with Ser Arlan, obviously in the books and in this show, and it’s important to show both sides of this so it wasn’t just somebody eulogizing and thinking about how great they were. We see the knight and squire relationship can be quite brutal and quite complicated at times.”
Taking a moment like that and playing it for laughs is “just a very handy tool to get a bit of background on Dunk […] very quickly so that you can launch into the story with us,” Claffey explained. “Obviously we don’t have the benefit of Dunk’s inner monologue as we do in the books and we can’t ever cut away from [his point-of-view] either. Everyone has to be in with this one human being from the get go. So packing information into there was the fun, was the challenge of this series.”
(featured image: HBO)
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