I want to talk about the game Cards Against Humanity.

I don’t know if you know where I’m going with this or not.

I don’t know if I know where I’m going with this.

Let’s find out.

Your daily Lex.

I remember when Cards Against Humanity first came out and when that game was all the rage.

Like, people were very excited about Cards Against Humanity, and I was, and I used to love playing it.

If you’re not familiar, if you don’t remember, it’s a party game, which means it’s a strategyless game where the goal is mostly to have fun.

That’s my interpretation of party games.

That’s a card-based game where, much in the vein of Apples to Apples, you get cards that can be combined in various ways.

One person plays a card and everybody else plays a card, and everything goes well with it.

And it’s meant to be ribald, adult, offensive.

It’s meant to be hilarious.

And I loved that game for a long time.

But over time, I really stopped liking that game.

There were a couple reasons.

One is, we won’t go too deep in it, but one of the co-designers of that game, Max Temkin, he had some troubles.

Let’s leave it at that.

This is a happy show.

But I also just kind of got sick of it, and it reminded me of something.

A thousand years ago, when I went to the summer camp that some of my kids now attend or work at, there was an activity there that was the newspaper, and we published a newspaper many days, not every day, but many days.

And it was called the Monthly Mac Times for a while, even though it wasn’t monthly, but because it was made on Macs.

Wyatt had a reference the computers it was made on is beyond me, but it did.

And as the newspaper people, we were known as the writers.

And so every year at that camp, the camp director would ask us if we could make up some kind of funny quiz to quiz people on the rules of camp life.

So they would go over what all the rules were, and then you would take this quiz.

And to write this quiz, what we would do is we would put together multiple choice questions where it was like, Are you supposed to sneak out of your bunks?

And I guess probably wasn’t the answer, no questions.

You know, what’s the proper time to get back to your bunk?

And it would be like, you know.

One answer would be the right answer, and then the other options would all be joke answers.

It was very obvious what the right answers were, and the idea was this was another way to drive home what the camper rules were.

And people actually had to take these things and fill them out and give them back to us.

And there were some campers, including some who I’m still friends with now, who would fill this out and put in all the wrong answers.

Like they would circle what they thought were the funniest of our option answers and think that that was funny.

And I’m like, you didn’t make the joke.

We made the joke, right?

Like it’s built in.

Like you’re not actually being funny.

We did the funny work.

Cards Against Humanity doesn’t have exactly that problem because you are coming up with what’s the funniest card to play in this given situation.

And there’s voting and there’s the social aspects of it.

But it’s not nearly as creative as it feels like it is the first time, because you are taking pre-written jokes from others that are meant to be over the top or too soon or I can’t believe they went there style jokes.

And you’re just playing cards that are jokes that other people wrote.

And I don’t know.

I would never want to play that game anymore.

And there were so many, are so many knockoffs of that game.

I mean, it itself has been compared to Apples to Apples, which came out in 1999 versus Cards Against Humanity that came out in 2011.

But like, crazy.

It’s just funny to me that these things, that this game was at one point so hugely popular.

Now you can like buy it in Target and whatever.

But I got emails from them today.

I still think that Cards Against Humanity does some great promotion from time to time.

But it’s just, I don’t know, where at one point I loved it, I just, it doesn’t do it for me anymore.

And I don’t know.

I thought it was going to have more coherent thoughts to share on this front.

I’m not sure that I did here just now, but I tried.

But it’s, I don’t know, there’s something about it where it feels like it’s less funny when you’re just recycling other people’s jokes.

That’s all.

I never want to play that game.

Part of it is top of mind because I have a game night tonight where we’re going over a friend’s house and we’re going to play some games.

And that friend, or the husband of that couple, loves, you know, what I would call Settlers of Catan-style games where Catan, whatever you say, but like deep strategy, complicated games where you spend 45 minutes minimum just learning the rules.

I like a sillier game, not necessarily Catan.

My favorite game probably of all is maybe Beyond Balderdash or— Salad bowl, that kind of game.

So I don’t need to be that kind of game either, but somewhere closer to that side than to the Catan side.

So Lauren and I will definitely take some games with us tonight just so we can make sure we don’t play overly strategic games.

That’s all.

That’s my update for Wednesday, August 12th.

Hope you’re having a wonderful day.

You’re the greenest.

Lex.

Hey, I’m back again.

After finishing the episode, but before posting, I went and read the Cards Against Humanity Wikipedia page, and it helped me get to another point that I think I wasn’t verbalizing but was thinking about, which is that the game, I think, punches down.

I think they’ve made improvements to the game, from what I’ve read, where they tried to improve some of the cards.

But some things aren’t funny.

And listen, that’s a debatable topic.

Can anything be funny?

And as a person who likes comedy, I don’t want to limit what people can make jokes about.

But, like, I don’t want to see somebody play a card about mass shootings, let’s say, which at least was a card in the group and may still be.

According to Wikipedia, this year’s mass shooting remains in the game.

And there were jokes about sexual assault and child abuse and other things.

I don’t know.

Not everything, like shock value isn’t the same as funny.

It’s just like comedians who love to drop an F-bomb.

I love F-bombs.

I love using F-bombs.

I love hearing F-bombs.

But they have to be earned.

They have to make sense.

I don’t love when it’s like somebody’s just swearing for the sake of swearing, just saying, like, that walks into a bar.

Fuck.

That’s not funny.

There’s no joke there.

So anyway, there’s something about that with Cards Against Humanity too.

Anyway, now I’m done slagging on a game that is extremely successful and made all of its founders millionaires.

Goodbye.