How to make an exquisite corpse

A drawing game you can play with anybody

Hey y’all,

The full moon played tricks on us and we had bail on our previously planned Sunday dinner spot. It’s a special kind of torture waiting to be served at a mediocre restaurant with two hangry tweens. To pass the time, I pulled out my pocket notebook — I never leave home without it! — and we played a few rounds of exquisite corpse, a game invented by the Surrealists:

Participants play by taking turns drawing sections of a body on a sheet of paper, folded to hide each individual contribution. The first player adds a head—then, without knowing what that head looks like, the next artist adds a torso, and so on. In this way, a strange, comical, often grotesque creature is born.

Our results:

Four years ago, the kids helped me make a silly video showing folks how to play:

I love this video so much. The creative chaos of those days is exactly what I was trying to bottle up for my next book, Don’t Call It Art. In fact, there’s an illustration in the book that includes a few of our corpses: