Cards Against Humanity is a game. It's not played with dice or boards, but with cards and a sense of humor. It's basically Apples to Apples with political references, pop culture, racism, and sexual innuendo. It's a wildly popular game that seems to be gaining momentum.
The game's tagline is, "A Party Game for Horrible People." This is a pseudo warning that Cards is not for the easily offended. As the game relies heavily on making light of serious situations (racism, the Holocaust, diseases, death, child abuse, etc), it's a self-deprecating admission that anyone who would laugh at things like coat hanger abortions is clearly a horrible person.
I've had a number of conversations recently with people who like the game for the most part, but are particularly offended by one card or another, usually because something hits too close to home. The proximity of my life to Virginia Tech, for example, means that the "Virginia Tech Massacre" card is deeply personal to many of my friends. I know people who have removed that or other cards from the game because it would be tasteless to make a punchline out of 32 shortened lives, some of whom they may have known personally.
My problem with this is that they don't see the cognitive dissonance they must employ to keep playing the game. Auschwitz? Hilarious! Institutionalized gender discrimination? I can't contain my laughter! Virginia Tech Massacre? How dare you?!
More importantly, at its core, this is really an issue of censorship. We live in a world where we still have to fight over which books can and can't be shared in libraries and schools; if we start selectively allowing certain types of humor to be rejected by an all-too-arbitrary filter, we'll be forever bounded by our fear of ideas we don't like. As with everything else, South Park puts it succinctly - in this clip, Cartman is using people's delicate sensibilities to get not just one episode, but an entire series thrown off the air:
If everyone got to weigh in on which cards crossed their personal line, the game would be over before it began. My VT friend takes out the massacre card. My Jewish friend takes out a card about the Holocaust. Now my black friend comes over and we have to be careful not to offend him. At some point, we're just playing Apples to Apples. I'm not saying everyone should find shooting a rifle into the air while balls deep in a squealing hog funny, I'm saying that if you don't like bestiality, you shouldn't play the game at all.
People who advocate for removing the "risqué" cards do so from a false stance of moral superiority, bravely claiming that some things just shouldn't be laughed about. I submit that these people are actually missing the point entirely: we laugh when we hear "What will always get you laid? Date Rape!" not because it's funny, but because it's absurd. We laugh precisely because our moral compass is calibrated correctly and we realize just how awful the Three Fifths Compromise is. I would argue that the people who play Cards Against Humanity without shame are more equipped to handle the world's moral quandaries than those who would choose to ignore them.
