Cards Against Humanity Shares Its Holiday Haul With Its Chinese Workers And WBEZ

By Tankboy in Arts & Entertainment on Dec 18, 2015 8:17PM

Illustration by Jana Kinsman and Kevin Budnick via Cards Against Humanity

Cards Against Humanity is really getting into the giving spirit this holiday season: The local card game makers have donated $150,000 to WBEZ and paid for the Chinese workers who manufacture their games to get a much-needed week of vacation.

It was all done with your money, if you were among the 150,000 people who purchased CAH's mystery Eight Sensible Gifts for Hanukkah. The promotion involved paying $15 to receive eight nights-worth of very sensible surprise gifts. For the first three nights, the gifts were all identical socks. But by night four, things started to get more interesting (see below), and they ramped things up even further on night five.

Here's the full text of the card they sent out on the fifth night.

Photo by Jim Kopeny / Tankboy

Why would Cards Against Humanity do this? I mean, other than to get us on the WBEZ mailing list?

About 70 percent of Americans believe that NPR and PBS receive 1 percent or more of the federal government’s budget, and a recent CNN/Opinion Research poll found that 7 percent of Americans believe that public broadcasting receives 50 percent or more of the federal budget, or about 1.8 trillion dollars. Those Americans are idiots; their favorite movie is probably Crash.

In reality, funding for public television and radio makes up just 0.014 percent of the federal budget, with radio only receiving 26 percent of that. (For reference, this is less than Congress spent on Abrams tanks that the Army specifically asked them not to buy).

You can read Cards Against Humanity's full reasoning here, and I highly suggest you do, if only to find out how they would spend 1 percent of the Federal budget on Public radio.

I subscribed myself and my wife to this year's Cards Against Humanity’s Eight Sensible Gifts for Hanukkah. Previous years of their surprise gifts have always been humorous and inventive so I thought it was a good deal. Then their Black Friday prank happened and I began to wonder. And then the first three nights of gifts were ... socks. Certainly sensible, but not exactly exciting. On night four things got far more inventive with the delivery of both the "Jew Pack Part One"—including such "fun facts" as "Natalie Portman is a sex golem created by Jewish wizards over 2,000 years ago"—and a $1 share in a US Treasury Inflation Security Protected Securities Fund to be cashed in between January and April, 2017. And then the night five gift to WBEZ arrived, with the announcement of the donation. And these really cool custom Field Notes books.

Photo by Jim Kopeny / Tankboy

Photo by Jim Kopeny / Tankboy

But, as they say on TV, that's not all! On night six, Cards Against Humanity revealed they gave everyone working in the Chinese factory that produces their game a week's paid vacation.

I've worked with Chinese factories in the past, and can attest to the fact that this is truly unusual. Outside of some time off for the Chinese New Year, Chinese factory workers do not vacations. Ever. It's such a foreign concept that Cards Against Humanity had to figure out how to make it actually happen:

The printer didn’t have any formal procedures for paid vacations, so we bought 100% of the factory’s capacity and paid them to produce nothing for a week, giving the people who make Cards Against Humanity an unexpected chance to visit family or do whatever they pleased.

And how did that go over? Well, you can see the photos of the vacationing workers here.

Well played Cards Against Humanity. I can't wait to see what nights seven and eight hold in store for us.