Equal Opportunity Racism? Review of Cards Against Humanity, created by Josh Dillon, Daniel Dranove, Eli Halpern, Ben Hantoot, David Munk, David Pinsof, Max Temkin, and Eliot Weinstein, distributed by Cards Against Humanity LLC

Abstract

Cards Against Humanity describes itself as ''a party game for horrible people'' (cardsagainsthumanity.com n.d.). Despite the description, the card game has received a significant amount of success. The game is often referred to as an R-rated version of the popular card game Apples to Apples. The rules of the game are fairly simple: one player acts as the dealer and reads from one of the black cards, which poses a question or requests a response to a ''fill-in-the-blank'' statement. The other players submit a white card with words or phrases that respond to the black card question or statement. Examples of black cards are ''Daddy, why is mommy crying?'' and ''In L.A. County Jail, word is you can trade 200 cigarettes for _____.'' Examples of white cards are ''Chunks of dead hitchhikers'' and ''Firing a rifle in the air while balls deep in a squealing hog.'' The white cards also include provocative statements regarding, but not limited to, topics of race, class, and gender; such as ''My Black ass,'' ''The American Dream,'' and ''Hormone injections.'' Max Temkin and seven of his friends from high school, all straight White men, created the game and took it public in 2008 (Lowenstein 2014). Since then, the game has generated millions of dollars in sales, one estimate placed it at US$12 million as of 2013 (Lagorio-Chafkin 2014). Cards Against Humanity has a large presence in

Cards Against AI: Predicting Humor in a Fill-in-the-blank Party Game

“…To the best of our knowledge, CAH has only been explored in the literature through pedagogical, ethical or sociological lenses (e.g., (Strmic-Pawl and Wilson, 2016)), not computational or linguistic ones. We note the data contains offensive humor, and should be very carefully used as training data.…”