ADULT ANIMATED FEATURE FILM
The First Humor Being
When God loses the blueprints for Creation, His lonely, self-loathing first human and the equally ‘failed’ first woman must fall in love to enter Paradise and retrieve them — only to discover that perfection would erase the very differences that make love and laughter possible.
- Comps
- Shrek · Sausage Party · The Good Place
- Genre
- Adult Animation · Satirical Fantasy · Romantic Comedy · Creation Myth
The story
Before Adam, before Eve, before daylight has even settled into its job, God creates Valdi — His first experimental human. Valdi is short, wild-haired, buck-toothed, dressed in oversized boots and a leather jacket, and furious that the Almighty has given him a face he does not want and nobody to talk to. After a week alone in the void, he demands company. God obliges with Eva: huge hat, huge purse, huge personality, and absolutely not the Hollywood bombshell Valdi ordered. They insult each other, repel each other and are equally convinced they are failed prototypes.
Then God admits the real problem: He has lost the Notes containing His original plan for Creation. Without them, the world is filling with neck cricks, mosquitoes, bad breath and other mistakes. Valdi agrees to retrieve the Notes in exchange for being remade handsome, only to learn they are hidden in the Garden of Eden. Entry is permitted to living visitors on one condition: they must genuinely be in love. Eva already loves Valdi. Valdi is convinced he cannot love Eva because she does not look the way he thinks love is supposed to look. A disastrous attempt to find him a prettier partner through personal ads finally gives him something he insisted he did not possess — a sense of humor — and reveals that the woman who makes him laugh, feel at home and brave enough to be himself has been beside him all along.
Inside Paradise, the newly in-love pair locate Stereo-Gerda, whose breasts broadcast radio around the clock, recover the hidden Notes and discover the horrifying blueprint: one race, one country, one season, one kind of everything — no love, no friendship, no difference, because difference creates conflict. Valdi and Eva burn the plan. THE FIRST HUMOR BEING is an irreverent adult creation comedy about two ‘failed’ people discovering that imperfection is not the flaw in the universe but the reason love, laughter and individuality can exist at all — an idea especially suited to stylized animation, where Creation itself can behave like the world’s least supervised cartoon.
Comparisons & craft: how it reads on screen
SHREK is the emotional comparison. Both stories begin inside a culture of appearance that tells unconventional bodies they are mistakes, then turn the romance itself into the argument against that premise. Valdi wants God to make him handsome and dismisses Eva because she is not the bombshell he ordered; Eva has absorbed the same cruelty and believes her size makes her unlovable. The story does not solve this by magically redesigning either of them. It lets attraction grow out of companionship, laughter, irritation, loyalty and the feeling of being ‘at home’ with another person. The joke is on the fantasy of perfection, not on the two imperfect bodies who fall in love.
SAUSAGE PARTY supplies the adult-animation permission. Theology, sex, creation, death and the mechanics of existence are treated with gleeful irreverence, while the world obeys cartoon logic: a divan and red phone booth appear in the void, God speaks through bonfires, Hell has pay phones, Paradise has visiting hours, and a woman’s breasts broadcast weather and Top 40 in stereo. Animation would let the film embrace those ideas literally rather than constantly asking live-action visual effects to justify them. The obscenity is part of the comic register, but the engine beneath it is unexpectedly tender.
THE GOOD PLACE is the closest structural cousin. Cosmic rules become physical comedy and philosophy becomes plot. Saint Peter is an exhausted gatekeeper with an iPod; living visitors may enter Eden only if they are genuinely in love; a tree will literally expose romantic fraud by withering; Paradise allows exactly one hour of visiting time. The central philosophical question is therefore never delivered as a lecture. Valdi and Eva have to live through it: would a painless world without difference, jealousy, longing or loss still be worth having if it also removed friendship and love? Their answer is to burn the blueprint.
The title contains the craft idea. Valdi begins by insisting he has no sense of humor. He wants beauty, certainty and a corrected design. But the first real emotional breakthrough arrives when Birgit’s disastrous visit makes him laugh uncontrollably at the absurdity of his own existence; immediately afterward, Eva’s affection becomes visible to him in a new way. By the finale, even God is laughing. THE FIRST HUMOR BEING is therefore not simply the story of the first man to tell jokes. It is a creation myth in which humor becomes one of humanity’s survival mechanisms: the ability to live with imperfection without needing to erase it. That thematic clarity, combined with strongly caricatured silhouettes, elastic locations and impossible visual gags, makes it a particularly strong candidate for an adult animated feature.
Story Slate · The First Humor Being · Bjarne O. Henriksen · Confidential — for industry consideration