Be Funny Now! is a Free-to-Play online Party Game made by YouTuber Jack Douglass (of Jacksfilms fame) and Galvanic Games, created in the Unity engine.
In the game, players in a party must select one of three prompts per round and must answer the prompt (either by answering it or by drawing it) in the funniest way possible, which are then subjected to a group vote, where other players use emoticons to show approval or disapproval of your answer. Beware the tomatoes!
The game is a Creator-Driven Successor to Jack's YIAY
series, only with more direct Audience Participation elements thrown in. In essence, it's a considerably less NSFW version of Cards Against Humanity. The game would also be used as a way of making new YIAY episodes, in the form of Youtube Shorts.
It was released on May 17, 2022 for all major platforms; PC (via Steam), Android (via Google Play), and iOS. Jack also confirmed in advance that, despite not officially supporting the platform, the Steam Deck (and therefore most distributions of Linux) can also run the game as well via Proton.
On November 8, 2022, the game received an update to revamp the gameplay, dubbed by Jack as Be Funny Now 2.0. Notably, the free-for-all mode is now more competitive, as it pits answers against players instead of revealing them one at a time and removes the ability of ending up with negative points. It also adds more chances to see the players' avatars, such as at the ending podium or the lobby.
On April 30th, 2024 Jack announced that the Be Funny Now servers would be taken offline "soon".
Compare with Cards Against Humanity, The Jackbox Party Pack and Drawful.
Tropes! List them all here:
- Audience Participation: It being a party game, this is all but required by players. Players pick a prompt and answer said prompt, and also spam emoticons to show praise or disgust at other peoples' answers.
- Black Comedy: Some of the answers logically come off as this, especially by the prompts that are often intentionally trying to invoke this trope for the player.
- Character Customization: When you create an account, you can create an avatar, and the rewards you get are to personalise the character even more.
- Clickbait Gag: Some of the prompts are "Clickbait this sentence", which is usually a boring sentence of some kind, such as "I put pizza in the oven", which players need to corrupt to sound more enticing.
- Continuity Nod: If you have tomatoes thrown at you or roses flung your way, the player will continue to wear or hold the items throughout all the rounds.
- Double Entendre: Many of the questions are formatted like this, such as What is the first step of a guide where the seventh step is "Squeeze it harder".
- Lootbox: After every successful game, you get a prize box that usually contains various amounts of coins.
- Microtransactions: Bundles of coins and crystals can be bought for as low as $0.99, going up to $99, which are used to spend on cosmetics (mostly crystals) and tomato's (coins).
- Play Every Day: Every day a new prompt of the day is asked which you can answer, as well as choose three random answers out of nine shown to you shown to you made by other people.
- Playing Pictionary: The drawing prompts have some of the same elements as the classic game, only you all know the answer; the difference is what's the funniest while still representing the original prompt.
- Premium Currency: Coins can buy cheap clothes, roses, and produce, but crystals can buy more coins as well as a greater variety of clothes. You have to buy crystals with real money, while coins can be earned in-game by playing the game and earning a Prize box.
- Produce Pelting: Tomato's can be bought with coins and thrown at people who make particularity bad answers.
- Purely Aesthetic Gender: The gender of your avatar isn't actually an option; you simply given hairstyles and other types of character customisation pieces that fall into either side, and you decide what to wear and make your avatar look like; the game doesn't stop the player from mixing and matching, say, female-oriented clothes and male-oriented hair.
- Rearrange the Song: Much of the music in the games' OST are covers of popular Jacksfilms songs, remixed by regular Jacksfilms contributor and editor Marshal Does Stuff. The Covers include "Twitter For Android" (from "Twitter for Android"), "Talking to a Camera" (from "We're all just assholes talking to a camera") "Drama ≠ Content" ("from Drama is more popular than Content"), and "MANSION (Sick EDM Remix Bro)" (from "MANSION").
- Shout-Out: Many of the prompts are to Jack's videos, in particular, a fair few of the prompts are retellings of YIAY questions:
- "Draw the new American flag" prompt comes from YIAY #233.
- "Draw a Valentines day card" prompt comes from YIAY #599.
- "Draw a new Olympic flag" prompt comes from YIAY #566.
- The various "Roses and red" prompts derive from the various YIAY Episodes that used it as a question.
- The "What Tutorial is this from?" questions are inspired by the "Guess the WikiHow Article" episode.
- The "Finish the Haiku" prompts all derive from the YIAY Haiku episodes.
- The various "If the answer is X, what is the question" prompts comes from YIAY #556
- "Draw the new American flag" prompt comes from YIAY #233
- Something about a Rose: Golden roses can be bought with coins, and can be thrown towards the player on stage if a person finds the answer particularly good.
- Stylistic Suck: Players may try their best, and sometimes may do genuinely impressive drawings in the 120 seconds allotted and get praised for it, but just as often, people will intentionally draw the most hilariously bad drawing possible, and still get just as much praise.
- Take That!: Several questions concern designing a new Tesla logo, creating specific steps to a WikiHow article (which, while WikiHow isn't named in-game, the reference to it as a "online tutorial" is strongly implied), and many more. And that's not going into people making their own via prompts.
- Vaudeville Hook: A hook pulls the player off the stage if the points accumulated go into the minus numbers, sometimes in the traditional manner, other times launching them off stage or beating them into the ground.
- Vulgar Humor: The prompts tend to imply it, rather than outright state it. However, this is usually played straight by players who pick up on the intended Double Entendre, while other players might attempt to subvert expectations by making a literal answer to the question.
- Wingding Eyes: If the Vaudeville hook beats the player into the ground, their eyes turn into dizzy swirls.
