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This game company is asking people to give it $5 as a Black Friday 'deal' — and it's already made more than $32,000

Cards Against Humanity game
Cards Against Humanity game

(Flickr/Connie Ma)

Cards Against Humanity, the self-proclaimed "party game for horrible people," has an unusual Black Friday deal: It's asking people to give it $5 to receive absolutely nothing in return.

"On Black Friday, everybody is selling something," the company writes in the FAQ section. "We’re the only company to offer the superior Black Friday experience of buying nothing."

Shortly after noon, the company had already reeled in more than $21,000. And the number just keeps climbing.

Game creator Max Temkin has a penchant for setting up quirky promotions. Last year the company sold $180,000 worth of actual bull poop, and the year before that it listed the game for $5 more than usual, which unexpectedly caused an enormous spike in sales.

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"We really hate Black Friday," Temkin tells Business Insider via email. "It's this really gross orgy of consumerism right after a holiday about being thankful for what you have — so we've always tried to think of funny jokes or comments we could make about the tradition."

He says that he had estimated this year's antic to raise about $2,500. The campaign had already soared past that projection by the time he was eating breakfast.

In Temkin's case, it literally pays to have a sense of humor.

Although the company FAQ page is vague about what will happen with the money, Temkin is less so.

"At this point we've raised enough money that the joke is funny, which is all that matters to me," he says. "Unless we raise enough that I can buy a jetski. Then I'll be excited again."

By our Google search, he's made more than enough already (the campaign hit more than $32,000 by 2 pm EST).

Temkin and his friends originally invented the wild card game several years ago, and it's kind of a dirty fill-in-the-blanks game where you complete funny phrases with answers like "spontaneous human combustion" or "my collection of high-tech sex toys."

Cards Against Humanity
Cards Against Humanity

(Cards Against Humanity)

Temkin says that this was the purest joke on the Black Friday format that he and the team could come up with.

"It's always a huge risk when we do something insane like this — we all lose a lot of sleep wondering if the joke will be company-endingly hilarious," he adds. "Ultimately I think we just need to trust that if it makes us laugh, it will make our fans laugh, and they will want to be in on the joke with us."

Temkin himself likes to participate in public acts of amusement. When Kurt Braunohler raised $6,000 on Kickstarter to hire someone to write "HOW DO I LAND?" in the sky over Los Angeles earlier this year, he donated $50 to the cause.

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