How Cards Against Humanity Killed Santa

Here’s the promotional video we made for this year’s Holiday Bullshit. This might be our weirdest video yet, so we thought we’d tell you how it was made.

The idea came to us easily. We were crowded in the conference room one day and Jenn said, “what if Santa died?” An awkward silence followed, and then everyone started talking at once about how a funeral for Santa would be pretty dark.

Holiday Bullshit is a complicated project, and can only work if we’re strict on print and mailing deadlines. We couldn’t launch the promotion a day later than November 10th. That gave us one week to film the video, and to film, we had to:

write a script

hire a film crew

find someone jolly enough to play Santa

hire a makeup artist

rent equipment

hire enough extras to fill out the funeral home and mourn

find a funeral home

rent a U-Haul

rent a Santa suit

rent a casket

We also tried to rent real reindeer, but it turns out there are all kinds of restrictions. You have to keep it in a pen, you have to hire a trainer with it, you can’t let it indoors, etc. Fair enough.

Getting a casket was easier. We rented one for $250 from a theatre prop studio and then attracted a lot of looks when we dragged it down the sidewalk.

Finding a funeral home was the hardest part. We tried a dozen places and no one understood what we wanted to do with it and refused to let us film inside. That meant we had to make our own set, so we rented the Bug House Theatre in Chicago, which luckily came with church pews but looked nothing like a funeral home at first:

You can’t really tell in the video, but Claire made the set really detailed and kind of disturbing. We ordered ugly curtains and real funeral flowers and even framed a dozen creepy photos to remember him by:

About thirty people acted as extras to fill out the pews. Everyone showed up in formal black clothing and even before filming, it really felt like walking into someone’s funeral. No one really knew if it was okay to be loud and talk, or act quiet and somber. It was deeply weird.

Our Santa was played by Kyle Tally. Filming took about three hours, and it was hardest on Santa because the casket was cramped and the lights were really hot under the full suit. When he pretended to be dead, he had to hold his breath the whole time to give us a really convincing performance.

We were really happy with how it came out, especially once we added the choir, the animation, and voice acting. We have to give credit where credit is due here:

Music by Noam Wallenberg of Rax Trax Recording

Produced by Claire Friedman

Makeup by Zee Gustafson

Animation by Ben Hantoot

Directed by Kevin Walsh, with Sebastian Lama, Josh Mandell and Alex Cox



Location Audio by David Gigl

Voiceover by Alan Baxter

Rest in Peace, Santa.

(By the way - there are still slots open for Holiday Bullshit. Go sign up, and we’ll send you ten gifts in December.)