Cards Against Humanity, the often-vulgar card game, has launched a limited edition of its namesake product without any instructions and with a detailed explanation of each joke, "why it’s funny, and any relevant social, political, or historical context."
Why? Because, produced in this form, "Cards Against Humanity Explains the Joke" is not a game at all, which would be subject to tariffs as the cards are produced overseas. Instead, the product is "information material" and thus not sanctionable under the law Trump has been using—and CAH says it has obtained a ruling to this effect from Customs and Border Patrol.
"What if DHS Secretary and Dog Murderer Kristi Noem gets mad and decides that Cards Against Humanity Explains the Joke is not informational material?" the company asks in an FAQ about the new edition. (If you don't follow US politics, Noem really did kill her dog Cricket.) Answer: "She can fuck right off, because we got a binding ruling from Trump’s own government that confirms this product is informational and 100% exempt from his stupid tariffs."
Pre-orders for the $25 product end on October 15, and it will allegedly never be reprinted. All profits will be donated to the American Library Association "to fight censorship."
This is the way
Now, I would never claim that Cards Against Humanity is a particularly highbrow form of entertainment; for instance, the website promoting the new edition opens with "Trump is Going to Fuck Christmas" in giant white letters. (That headline refers to Trump's tariffs... I hope.)
"This holiday season, give your loved ones the gift of knowledge, give America’s libraries the gift of cash, and don’t give Donald Trump a fucking cent," the site says.
Some of the cards and their explanations are more literate than you might expect. For instance, English majors and poetry lovers may recognize the source of this quotation, found on one of the game's cards, as the final lines of T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men":
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Cards Against Humanity mucks this up a bit by printing the final line as "Not with a bang, but with _____________" (extra comma, extra "with"). Ouch. But it redeems itself slightly by adding a nice note about the time and context of the composition, noting that the "humor comes from a juxtaposition of the poem's grandiloquent language with Cards Against Humanity's often crude, low-brow jokes." Hopefully, it inspires at least a few people who have never before heard the name "T.S. Eliot" to read some of his verse.
(If you want to give it a go, the greatest hits are probably "The Waste Land," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "The Hollow Men," "Journey of the Magi," "Ash Wednesday," and Eliot's long late masterpiece "The Four Quartets." Eliot is also responsible for the poems that served as the basis of the musical "Cats," which eventually became a feature film featuring human performers who at one point in development had feline buttholes. According to reports from inside the production, "The job of editing out all of the buttholes was ultimately left to one crew member who was hired specifically to excise unintended buttholes." Eliot would have hated everything about this sentence.)
CAH has done this sort of thing before. In 2017, the company bought a small plot of land in Texas on the US/Mexico border to "make it as time-consuming and expensive as possible for Trump to build his wall." In 2024, CAH sued SpaceX, saying that the rocket company had moved construction equipment onto CAH's Texas land without permission.
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