To the casual viewer, Adult Swim might just seem like the playground of *Rick and Morty*, a repository for beloved animated reruns, or the birthplace of pop culture relics only understood as meme characters by younger generations. But for those tuned to a stranger frequency—the real heads and Sickos—Adult Swim is something far more exciting: a creative fault line where the wacky, the wild, and the wildly original still erupt without warning.
It’s one of the last arenas on television where sheer imaginative chaos is celebrated. Many of the best Adult Swim shows resemble the kind of unfiltered creativity that might as well have oozed right out of the primordial soup and stumbled in front of a television camera, making it hard to imagine these shows going through a traditional development process.
After Joe Cappa’s animated short *Ghost Dogs* premiered at Sundance in 2021, he dove headfirst into making odd, wonderful videos for social media. Some, like the viral “Scooby Doo Shuffle,” “Dino Girl,” and his bizarre *Coupla Boys*, caught fire online, landing him gigs with Giphy and Bento Box. But it was *The Gabbagooblins*, a warped fever dream that exploded on TikTok, that really turned heads—especially at Adult Swim.
The network wasted no time commissioning a follow-up for their cult-favorite *Off the Air*, curated by Dave Hughes (also the brains behind *Adult Swim SMALLS*). Now that he was officially in the system, so to speak, Cappa pitched a strangely restorative *SMALLS* project about three jacked brothers who are innocently obsessed with their widowed dad. Thus, *HAHA, You Clowns* was born.
Fans devoured the 2-3 minute shorts, and now it’s a full-fledged series. I caught up with Cappa to talk about bringing *HAHA, You Clowns* to the big leagues, and what fuels his hilariously specific brand of comedy.
### Challenging Animation Industry Norms
The animation industry has been overwhelmingly homogenized in recent years, with many falsely believing that animation is a medium solely for children, or that adult animation can only resemble something like *The Simpsons* or *South Park*. There is plenty of incredible subversive, transgressive, and downright weird animation produced every day, but seeing it platformed by a major studio, network, or streamer remains rare.
“Adult Swim is definitely like the coolest, most chill, laid-back network to work for,” Joe Cappa tells me. “They have been very, not to say hands-off, but encouraging of artists and encouraging of me. They’ve been patient, and they really trust their artists, and I just can’t imagine this show living anywhere else but Adult Swim.”
### Embracing Wholesomeness in Comedy
When Cappa first started making short videos, he realized he communicated comedy differently. People quickly latched onto the wholesomeness of the characters, something that encouraged him. As he puts it, “This show is leaning into the wholesomeness, I guess, and just kind of embracing it. It’s still tongue-in-cheek, it’s overly sappy, but the characters really are like, genuine people.”
Audiences have become so accustomed to mean-spirited, almost humiliation-based styles of comedy dominating the last decade that whenever *HAHA, You Clowns* zags toward sincerity, the biggest laughs come from how unexpected it is to not take the easy route into cruelty.
“They sort of lack self-awareness, but they don’t really care, you know?” Cappa says of the brother characters, Tristan, Preston, and Duncan. “They could be laughed at, and it probably wouldn’t bother them too much, because all they care about is everybody having a good time and being nice to one another.”
*HAHA, You Clowns* is about three brothers and their dad, finding hilarity in relatability — like family movie nights, leaving your coat at the restaurant, and going on vacation.
### From Shorts to Full-Length Episodes
The original *SMALLS* shorts ran about two minutes, but the new series expands that runtime to 11 minutes. Not every short is meant to be longer than a few minutes, but Cappa had no problem writing longer adventures for these boys.
“Shockingly, it was very easy, and my co-writer on the show is my brother, so we have this sort of shared sense of humor and shared knowledge of our father, of the Midwest, of our brotherly love to each other,” he explains.
He continues, “So I think we kind of feed into that, and I mean, these scripts that we end up writing could be half an hour, and we have to like start trimming because we’re like, ‘Damn, we got to fit all this in 11 minutes.’ I think we could just keep writing and writing these characters. It comes very naturally, and it’s a very fun place to live inside their minds.”
### Midwestern Roots and Real-Life Inspiration
The characterizations are inspired by Cappa’s life in the Midwest and the kind of people he was used to interacting with. As a fellow Midwesterner, I can confirm that the boys are the same brand of corn-fed, farm-strong himbos with necks as thick as their hearts that I knew, too.
“This show and the stuff I make, inherently, is reactionary to the stuff that I see out there, because I haven’t been in a movie theater and laughed in a very, very long time, and it’s very frustrating,” Cappa says. “I find it rewarding to surprise my audience.”
### Redefining Adult Animation
Some people think of “adult animation” as raunchy or violent comedies that happen to be animated. However, adult animation is as diverse and expansive as can be imagined. *HAHA, You Clowns* is an adult animated comedy series that stands out by taking a totally different approach to humor.
“It’s 2025 and like, the world feels very crazy right now,” Cappa correctly recognizes. “It doesn’t hurt to laugh at people trying to be sweet and have a good time, and it’s not mean-spirited. We can all have a good time watching it.”
The writing is packed with one-liners, but plenty of laughs come from moments when the characters aren’t saying anything at all.
“The animatic phase is the most fun phase of creating a show I’ve discovered,” Cappa shares. In one episode, a notable celebrity makes a cameo, and there’s a shot that lingers on their face, underscored with a music cue by Delicate Steve inspired by the guitar riffs of ’90s sitcoms.
“Seeing those together at the same time, I was like, ‘We have to just hold on to [the] face so we can hear the complete sting sustain,’” Cappa says through laughter. It’s a seemingly small decision but one that caused one of the biggest laughs.
This approach also helps *HAHA, You Clowns* resemble a show more like *7th Heaven* than something like *Family Guy*, which is exactly what Cappa was aiming for.
“That’s a big part of the humor, too,” he says. “We would tell our artists that it’s like a live-action director was given an animated show, and they don’t really know how to draw, but they’re trying to execute the thing as best as they can, and that’s sort of like the genre of humor to play.”
*HAHA, You Clowns* feels like the alternate reality of *Full House* if Danny Tanner was raising three boys, or *Home Improvement* if Tim was a widower, balancing its silliness and saccharine center with occasional profundity.
### A Personal Connection
Cappa’s voice is unquestionably present in the show’s characters — literally, as he voices the four main characters himself. He admits there’s a little piece of himself in all of them:
“Duncan is the youngest one, and he wants to impress his brothers. Tristan is the middle one, and I am a middle child. He’s also the one who wants to get into comedy, and that’s kind of his love language. And then there’s Preston, who is the leader and tries to get the thing done and tries to please Dad. He’s like the most in tune with Dad. I don’t know, I guess I’m a little bit of all of them.”
### Heartfelt Humor Set to a ’90s Sitcom Soundtrack
An offbeat comedy about brotherhood, family, and grief, set to a soundtrack that sounds like it was lifted from a forgotten ’90s sitcom—used both sincerely and ironically—*HAHA, You Clowns* manages to toe the line between heartfelt and ridiculous without falling completely into either, which feels like the point.
“In a way, I would say I’m a proud dad,” Cappa says. “And I hope they’re proud of me too.”
If there’s any justice left in animation, more people will realize Cappa is one of the most interesting figures working today. He did such a great job raising those boys that *HAHA, You Clowns* is primed to be Adult Swim’s next classic series.
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The full series of *HAHA, You Clowns* debuts on October 19, 2025, at 11:45 pm ET/PT, but the debut episode is currently available on YouTube.
https://www.slashfilm.com/1999390/haha-you-clowns-adult-swim-series-making-explained/