Cards Against Humanity - No Good

Cards Against Humanity

I hate Cards Against Humanity. They were playing it in anime club (I also hate everyone in anime club).

It all started when one of the openly gay members of anime club ran into a room saying, "Who wants to go to hell? We're all going to be racist and sexist!" I mention his sexuality only because 1.) he did and 2.) the irony of his insensitivity. He cleared off a table and they all began to play.

I don't have any friends in anime club (or anywhere else, really), so I sat nearby and watched. Eight white kids and one black kid circled around and started passing our cards. "It's okay to send the racist cards to him," the leader, who also claims to be a stand up comedian, said. "He's the only black guy here so it's not racist."

To this I said, "Wait, doesn't that make it more racist?"

"That's what makes it funny!" the black guy exclaimed.

I laughed uneasily. What was I going to say to that? I'm a white dude, I can't define the limits of racism if a person of color speaks up. Right?

The game begins. The overly specific nature of the cards makes everything "funny." With each reveal, the crowd laughed while I sat stone-faced, feeling nothing but shame. Later, when talking this over with my friend, Nick, he would explain it like this, "Apples to Apples is marginally interesting because you think you're being dirty when the game doesn't support it. You're perverting something pure."

"Pure" is certainly no way to describe Cards Against Humanity. Here are some of the cards.

• The gays.
• Five-Dollar Footlongs(TM).
• Eating all of the cookies before the AIDS bake-sale.
• Mecha Hitler.
• The Jews.
• Justin Bieber.
• Brown people.
• Ethnic cleansing.
• Jerking off in a pool of children's tears.

As you can see, everything there is "funny" as a non-sequitur. So when the category card "Why am I sticky?" comes up, you can throw in "Jerking off in a pool of children's tears." Or even something as simple as "The Jews." will garner a laugh.

The point is, in this game you are not interesting. Your friends are not interesting. The game has already done all the heavy lifting for you. When you pick up a card that says "Pac-Man uncontrollably guzzling cum" the joke is already made. And it's not fucking funny.

A review by Kyle Carpenter, though unfortunately somewhat positive, included this line, "At its core, CAH is Apples to Apples, but with a change in design that solves one of that game's fundamental problems: what if you play with boring people?"