Cards against humanity.

[Bored Of Education]

We were given this last year but haven't played it. Someone brought it out today to play and, I appreciate I may be being a 'triggered' 'snowflake', but it is awful. The premise is that someone reads out a sentence with a missing word in and you have a lot of cards with words or phrases that you can use to complete the sentences. The funniest answer wins. It's actually a reasonably good premise except for the fact that they have decided to make the possible answers as distasteful as possible. An example -

What did the US drop on the children of Afghanistan?

Possible answers

AIDS
Pedophiles
Amputees
Children with bum cancer

The last one was the one where I really thought, you know, is this what is supposed to be funny? I always find that when someone goes out of their way to be offensive, they think it's banter but forget actual comedy. This whole game seems to be some sort of DIY Frankie Boyle without any of the actual comedic genius that he can come up with at times. Of course, they preface it with "don't play if you are easily offended by homophobia, racism, etc" but that is a ridiculous get-out clause. You watch Bill Hicks or Stewart Lee playing with the parameters of offence and it is very clear what they are doing and how good they are at doing it. What they aren't doing is matching "What give me gas?" with "Auschwitz"

The other thing is that it is such knowingly safely middle class offence. The very fact that they put "bum cancer" instead of "leukaemia" because they think that saying "bum" somehow lightens it. They have an answer like "My black ass" or "A big black dick" but would never dream of putting "nigger" because they want to cover themselves - "Oh, 'a big black dick' on its own isn't offensive, it's only if you decide to put it together with "What would grandma find disturbing yet charming". So, it's crap.

[anton pulisov]

yeah it's an infantile game. played it once and didn't really find it very good

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

I've seen it described as a trojan horse for the alt-right, in that it normalizes saying really awful things, and turns it into "only banter."

[Bored Of Education]

Both very good descriptions.

[Snake Plissken]

I've seen it described as a trojan horse for the alt-right, in that it normalizes saying really awful things, and turns it into "only banter."

Which is, if you have any idea about the history of CAH, complete bullshit.

[DCI Harry Batt]

I have no such idea.

Are people using "trojan horse"...umm..."literally"? Like, thinking it's knowing and deliberate?

[Bizarre Löw Triangle]

This is a decent article/review of it. Aside from its enabling of oppressive language and behaviour, it's also not a good game.

https://www.shutupandsitdown.com/rev...inst-humanity/

My biggest problem with Cards Against Humanity is perhaps the same reason many find it so thrilling – it provides permission to tell jokes you don’t dare by removing all sense of responsibility.

I fundamentally don’t think that Cards Against Humanity is a funny game. The cards create jokes, but that isn’t what makes people laugh. The laughter comes from the giddy thrill of behaving in a way that we know is taboo. Your mate just said something massively racist, but it’s fine – they didn’t choose to put those cards together. And your other friend that did? Well, they didn’t really have many other cards. Besides, so many of the cards are nasty – it’s really just the nature of the game.

[Snake Plissken]

What a load of bollocks. And later I’m going to explain exactly why.

[Jah Womble]

I was encouraged to play it last Christmas and fundamentally agree with Bordeaux.

If you're going to 'punch down' (which is obviously the tactic of the bully), then frankly you require greater comic skills than most dining-table gamers are likely to have. A card game that essentially tries to pre-empt what it thinks its demographic will find hilarious really doesn't cut it for me.

(On the other hand, when I see somebody 'with' those requisite skills - eg, Frankie Boyle - simply not working hard enough and pandering to said LCD, it bugs the f*** out of me...)

[Satchmo Distel]

The founder worked on Obama's campaign. His motivation seems to be to get homophobes and racists to out themselves, but the flaw is that these homophobes and racists can claim they are being ironic and outing their horrible friends as the real homophobes and racists.

I think it's one of those things that starts out with anti-racist intentions, which then backfire.

[Snake Plissken]

The problem with discussion CAH in the abstract is that it fundamentally removes the key part of comedy, which is context. I've seen and done a lot of comedy. I've done jokes tied to 9/11, the Moors Murders, the various bombings in Manchester, and used Grenfell and London Bridge as a hook. Some of my favourite jokes of all time from other comics are - when stripped of context and simply typed out - are about wife beating and killing kids. And I'll not post them here because devoid of context, of setup, of build, they aren't funny. They need context. The exact same words taken out of context is a Daily Mail "outrage at comics sick joke" article. I never bother watching "Comedian destroys heckler" on Youtube because there is no bloody context, it's just a guy with a microphone abusing someone for a reason that is never explained.

CAH is all about context. BE (accidentally, I think) glossed over the key thing that makes CAH work. It isn't about "points", its a vote amongst the players. The trick to winning is to read the other players and play the right card in the right context. This is why noone plays the "Auschwitz" or "Madeline McCann" cards straight off, because the group and the game context isn't set up to accept it at that point. You can play the same two cards at two different points and get entirely different reactions. But writing down what the cards say without providing the context of the moment strips the whole thing of its core point. It is like reading a transcript of a Billy Connolly routine instead of listening to him deliver it.

The example given above about the US dropping things on Afghanistan... that's just a shit draw of the cards. Given the essentially random nature of the game, that selection at that point would have got a shrug.

As for taboo. No. No no no no no. CAH is about escapist transgression. If I award a round to someone who completes "The Pope is a secretly the worlds biggest fan of _____" with "big black cock", I'm not being racist or anti-religion. I just found that funnier than the other options. It doesn't make me a racist, it is just a bunch of friends breaking the rules because we're in a context where we're relaxed about breaking the rules. We're human beings, we like to break rules and norms. The difference is people break rules and norms in different contexts. Trying to apply the same rule across different contexts is bound to fail. I wouldn't play CAH with my parents or in any environment where I don't know what I'm getting myself into. It isn't for everyone, and even with strangers at a party the first few rounds are about feeling out the other players and working out the boundaries. But even then there is a context about when and where you play the game - and the underlying unspoken message is "this is not real and what happens on this table stays on this table".

I find that people criticising CAH in articles are the kind who will happily write those "outrage" pieces for the newspapers and are generally joyless fucks who would quite happily censor thought and speech if they didn't approve. It is the same bloody argument as "well, if you punch a Nazi then you are as bad as them". No, if I punch a Nazi, then I'm not automatically going to go home and start plotting the genocide of a religion. CAH is a joke. Nothing more, nothing less. It's not about the alt-right, it doesn't punch down. It's about release.

[DCI Harry Batt]

Oh, I was hoping for something a bit better than that. Oh well.

[Snake Plissken]

What more do you want? Stripping something of everything that makes it work and then criticising it for not working.

[Satchmo Distel]

Snake, I can see contexts where it works, but they depend on everyone in the room understanding the underlying point. The more commercial the game becomes, the more likely it is to become a plaything of white frat boys and Tory boys.

[DCI Harry Batt]

I dunno, something more than "I like saying 'big black cock', it makes me laugh, so therefore it's not racist", I suppose.

[Snake Plissken]

Snake, I can see contexts where it works, but they depend on everyone in the room understanding the underlying point. The more commercial the game becomes, the more likely it is to become a plaything of white frat boys and Tory boys.

You mean the game that you can download for free, can make apps for that are free, can make your own cards for for free. It's an open source game. Sure, you pay for the boxed version but that is for the convenience of having a high quality version.

Also: It isn't a game where you just grab it for a room of random strangers and I think people do others a disservice but not assuming that they are smart enough to know that.

[Snake Plissken]

I dunno, something more than "I like saying 'big black cock', it makes me laugh, so therefore it's not racist", I suppose.

Except that isn't what I said, is it?

[Satchmo Distel]

Snake, fair enough. I see your point and it's made me rethink.

[San Bernardhinault]

Snake, I can see contexts where it works, but they depend on everyone in the room understanding the underlying point. The more commercial the game becomes, the more likely it is to become a plaything of white frat boys and Tory boys.

I think this is true. You need to play it with the right people. Which is the same as other, similar "card-as-explanation" games. Whether it's the kids' version Apples to Apples. Or the politics one, Superfight. In those, you have to defend your card against other players' cards and the discussion is what's actually fun. It requires people with a certain level of intelligence and wit.

With CAH, you don't want to spend your time explaining why your answer is funny, but you do want people who actually have a sense of humour. I've played it with people who do, and it's a lot of fun. But then I've also played with people who seem to think that "funny" and "offensive" are synonyms, that the winner is the one who puts down the most outrageous card, not the one that's funniest in the context. And then the game just becomes boring and a ludicrous frat-boy challenge to see who can transgress most while not actually transgressing because they just drew a card.

[Snake Plissken]

That sounds like the kind of people who think comedy is a zany tie and sitting in a bath of beans for charity.

[Wouter D]

Eating hot soup is a slippery slope that leads to being on fire.

I wouldn't have known that if it weren't for this game.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

catching fire while cooking killed nearly as many victorian women as childbirth.

[MsD]

Is that a fact, or a joke? I've just Googled but can't find anything.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

it's a fact. They had it on QI and everything.

[MsD]

Cor.