Photos: Thank Comedy Hack Day For These Hilarious And Absurd Apps
By Marielle Shaw in Arts & Entertainment on Oct 5, 2015 6:39PM
We weren't sure what to expect on arrival at Sunday's Chicago Comedy Hack Day—and even less sure when we heard the names of some of the phone apps underway, such as the meme-evoking Cinebadger and the Monty Python-esque Chrome Plugin Glemns.
Nevertheless, teams of developers and comedians were already well underway developing the latest and greatest comedic gems for your phone and your Chrome. Teams formed upon their arrival at the Hack Day, worked until midnight, and then worked from breakfast until the curtain dropped on the Hack Day Finals awards ceremony.
As previous winner and show emcee Maya May explained, hack days aren't new. They're a marathon effort by teams of developers to create something useful for consumers. Or, in this case, something funny and possibly useful. With comedians and sponsors from the Cards Against Humanity team, Second City, and Nerdologues, we knew we could count on copious amounts of good humor, and we weren't disappointed. Presentation after presentation had us scratching our heads while our funny bones tickled.
There was The Grim Beeper, a service which helps you say what you couldn't say while you were alive upon your death, and 2moji, a scavenger hunt game where you and your friends try to find the common ground between two random emojis in the world around you.
The winners,though, brought things to another level.
The audience favorite was Team Cinebadger. Cinebadger is an app that we think could actually take off, if accepted in the app stores. Here's how it works: If you learn that a friend hasn't seen an essential movie, you can use the app to look up the movie, then gently, aggressively or via references to other movies, badger them into getting around to it.
Then there were Glemns. This team, which won the grand prize, went all out. From product page to videos, it was clear they were as talented technologically as they were comedically. In a Monty Pythonesque presentation in which absolutely no one broke character, they extolled the virtues of the mysterious Glemns, eventually unveiling their final product, a Chrome extension which would remove all other ads and replace them "mildly" or even "violently" with only the image of Glemns. Talking with them afterwards, we learned that many of the team members were in media and advertising.
"It's stuff we do every day, but we get to have more fun with it," said Elaine Lopez, one of the designers of the Glemns team.
The "glemn" concept is weirdly indescribable, but you can check it out here.
From start to finish, we had more fun too, and can't wait for next Hack Day.