Everyone has a fond memory of the first dirty joke they ever came up with. For the folks behind Cards Against Humanity, though, they believe all the creativity required to come up with a unique permutation of a friend’s mom, an unconventional orifice, a comically large amount of cum, is too much for any one person to handle. And reasonably so.
Leaving nothing to chance, Cards Against Humanity lets players easily construct off-color jokes by playing the best “answer” for the “question.” Minutes ago, you would have never thought to say that naked pictures of Hitler should be sent in an aid package to Haiti, but look at you now! You found that with someone doing 99% of the work for you, you too could construct jokes!
With all the fun of joke-writing wrung out of the process via playing the game, here is how you can kill any remaining semblances of fun and enjoyment by mercilessly dominating your opponents.
How to Win at Cards Against Humanity
1. Know your opponents.
Profiling gets a bad rap for glossing over a person’s individuality and clinging to often pernicious stereotypes. Profiling in Cards Against Humanity is even simpler because it needs only one profile: the Cards Against Humanity player. The CAH player is likely a drunk person who can’t construct his/her own jokes. You have the rest of your life to pretend that people’s eccentricities and peculiarities matter; dominating at CAH necessitates the ignoring of individuality.
Unless you happen to be playing against an actual Nazi who enjoys clamping electrodes to his/her genitals while molesting children, the cards are safely designed to hit on obvious and universal taboos of politics and sexuality. Black, white, man, woman, Mormon, non-Mormon; Cards Against Humanity unites people of all colors and creeds under the world’s worst joke-writing algorithm. It’s what Dr. King would have wanted.
2. Remind your opponents that time is linear and and the past consists of events they previously experienced.
“Do you remember that time when my answer was ______? Well, ______!” Whether you call it a runner, a call-back, or an inside joke, people love remembering things they have laughed at, even if the events are only minutes old. Leave your humility at the door and remind them how HILARIOUS it was when you paired “My sex life” with “A national disaster beyond FEMA’s scope”!
Referencing your own brilliant pairing of one concept with another has its limits, though. Thankfully, complimenting your opponents is just as effective. “Hey, remember that time you answered AIDS when my prompt was about favorite Christmas presents! We are both obviously the funniest people here!”
Your opponent is now a fan, and you are one step closer to winning!
3. Continue respiring, along with performing as many other autonomic functions as you can.
The necessary diffusion of oxygen into the blood that takes place in the pulmonary alveoli isn’t going to happen on its own!
4. Orchestrate a scene of false outrage.
Once you have a few jokers on your side, it’s time to turn the crowd against the game itself. The same basic rules of decency that lead to the predictable jokes and punchlines about predictable subjects are just as useful for building a consensus against the game.
All the nervous giggling when someone is waiting to reveal that they matched “The mentally handicapped” with “The ingredients of the McRib” are just signs that the person thinks its transgressive to suggest that the mentally handicapped shouldn’t be killed, much less harvested as an ingredient in a seasonal McDonald’s food item. The humor is self-deprecating in its darkness in that the sentiments are cartoonish. Awaken their latent sense of decency and political correctness by completely missing the caricature of “evil” that was just played.
Don’t worry that everyone won’t agree! Your allies will now feel comfortable saying that while they can appreciate the outrageousness of pairing “Ghandi” with “Sideboob,” they feel there are lines that should not be crossed. Across from them are people who don’t kowtow to censorship and believe you should be able to construct jokes from anything the makers of the game have limited players to.
5. Drop the mic and bow out.
Now that the crowd has been polarized along the lines of what combinations of jokes are hilariously awful or in extremely poor taste, casually mention that you have been depressed lately since your parents have gotten divorced. Whether or not this is true or patently absurd, take it as an excuse to suggest heading to a bar and getting some sympathy drinks. If that doesn’t work, just leave and drink by yourself in a cold, dark room.
Either way, the person no longer playing Cards Against Humanity is the real winner. Go, get ’em, champ!
