League has produced some genuinely beautiful skins, and it has also produced a manatee, a corgi and a robot wearing a fake moustache.
These are the ten that exist purely to be funny. No lore, no epic reveal cinematic, just an idea somebody had that Riot went ahead and shipped anyway.
Funniest Skins in LoL
10 Jokes Riot Actually Shipped
League has produced some genuinely beautiful skins, and it has also produced a manatee, a corgi and a robot wearing a fake moustache.
These are the ten that exist purely to be funny. No lore, no epic reveal cinematic, just an idea somebody had that Riot went ahead and shipped anyway.
Counting down from the ones that raise an eyebrow, to the one that's still the best joke in the store.
#10: Corgi Corki
The premise is that Corki isn't flying a plane, he's riding a corgi. That's the entire skin. Nobody asked what the corgi thinks about being fitted with a machine gun and a package delivery system, and honestly the skin is better for it.
What sells it is how straight the animations play it. The dog runs. It hovers when it shouldn't. The sound design commits completely. It's the rare joke skin that you can play for a hundred games without the joke going stale.
#9: Pretty Kitty Rengar
Rengar is a trophy hunter who collects the heads of the things he kills. Pretty Kitty Rengar is that same character in a pink bow, groomed within an inch of his life, being extremely proud of himself about it.
The comedy is the mismatch. Nothing about how he plays changes, so you still get the terrifying jump out of a bush, except the thing landing on you has been to a salon. It's one of the older joke skins and it holds up better than most.
#8: Mundo Mundo
Dr. Mundo's whole personality is that he refers to himself in the third person and goes where he pleases. So Riot made a skin that is just Mundo, wearing a Mundo costume, which is the most Mundo thing that could possibly have happened.
It's a joke that only works because the champion had already told you exactly who he is for a decade. You don't need a description to get it, which is the mark of a good comedy skin.
#7: Bard Bard
Bard is a cosmic wanderer who speaks in chimes and answers to nobody. Bard Bard is that entity dressed as an actual medieval bard, complete with a lute, because his name is Bard and somebody at Riot could not let that go.
The best part is that the joke is entirely linguistic. There's no gag animation you have to wait for and no punchline in the recall. The name does all the work and the art just quietly confirms it.
#6: Gentleman Cho'Gath
A monster from the Void, in a monocle and a top hat, with a walking cane he does not need. The skin's joke is that he stays impeccably polite while eating people, and it gets funnier the bigger he gets, because his suit scales with him.
It's also the one on this list that has aged into being genuinely stylish. A lot of people play it now without thinking of it as a joke skin at all, which is arguably the highest compliment a joke skin can get.
#5: AstroNautilus
Nautilus is a diver at the bottom of the ocean. AstroNautilus is the same champion in space, and the entire skin exists so that the name could be a pun. There is no deeper reason and there doesn't need to be one.
The art is legitimately good, which is what makes it land. It would be easy to phone in a costume swap for a wordplay skin, and instead the anchor became a grappling hook trailing a tether through zero gravity.
#4: Nunu & Willump Bot
This one is a joke about the game itself. Every player who ever queued into a bot game met a Nunu who pathed strangely, sat in a bush and did something inexplicable at the wrong moment, so Riot made a skin of that.
The visual gag is the yeti rendered as a clunky machine with a boy driving it, and the deeper gag is that a real player using this skin is now indistinguishable from the training dummy. People have absolutely used that on purpose.
#3: Beemo
Teemo as a bee. It should not be as good as it is. The mushrooms become honeypots, the blowdart becomes a stinger, and the entire kit reads as adorable right up until you walk into one of them in the river at nineteen minutes.
That contrast is the joke, and it's the sharpest one on this list. Teemo is the most hated champion in the game, and this skin dresses him as the single least threatening creature Riot could find. Nobody has ever been fooled by it.
#2: Urfwick
Warwick, wearing Urf the manatee as a costume. Urf is League's oldest running in-joke, a mascot who was killed off in an April Fools patch and has been resurfacing ever since, and this skin is his most permanent monument.
It's also one of the rarest things anyone can have on their account, which turned a gag skin into a status symbol. Seeing one in your game is genuinely a small event, and the champion underneath it is still a wolf that runs you down from across the map.
#1: Definitely Not Blitzcrank
A giant steam golem puts on a trench coat, a pair of glasses and a fake moustache, and the skin's position is that you now have no idea who this is. That's it. That's the whole skin, and it's still the funniest one in the game.
What makes it the best rather than just the silliest is that the disguise is doing something. Blitzcrank's entire game is standing somewhere you aren't looking and pulling you out of position, so a skin whose premise is "you didn't see him" is a joke and a threat at the same time. Nobody who's been grabbed by one out of a bush finds it funny in the moment.
Conclusions
The skins that land aren't the ones with the most effort in them, they're the ones with the clearest idea. A corgi, a pun, a costume of yourself, a robot in a disguise nobody buys. Every one of these can be explained in a single sentence, and none of them needs you to know any lore to get it.
It's also a side of League that shows up less than it used to. A lot of what gets made now is beautiful and serious and sits inside a larger themed universe, which is great, but there's a reason people still talk about the manatee. Riot being willing to ship something purely because it was funny is one of the things that made the game feel like ours.
If old League is what you came for, we've also written up ten things the game used to have and quietly deleted, and for the seasonal picks there's the ten best Halloween skins ranked.
Every ranking we've argued about is collected on the Top Ten Thursdays hub.
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