Inside The Shockingly Pain Free Making Of A New Adult Swim Classic

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 [complementary] — 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, so it's hard to imagine these shows going through a 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" and "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 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. "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.

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's plenty of incredible subversive, transgressive, and downright weird animation being put out every day, but to see it platformed by a major studio, network, or streamer is a lot harder to come by. "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."

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 Cappa, who says: "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 that have been dominating over the last decade that whenever "HAHA, You Clowns" zags into the direction of 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. The "SMALLS" shorts ran about two minutes, but the new series pumps that number up to 11. 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. Cappa continued:

"So I think we kind of feed into that, and I mean, these, 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 like 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."

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."

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, but it stands out from the crowd 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 itself is chock-full of one-liners, but plenty of laughs are when characters aren't saying anything.

"The animatic phase is the most fun phase of creating a show I've discovered," Cappa says. 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. It also helps "HAHA, You Clowns" resemble a show more like "7th Heaven" than something like "Family Guy," which is exactly what Cappa was going 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" is the alternate reality of "Full House" if Danny Tanner was raising three boys or "Home Improvement" if Tim was a widower, and like those shows, balances its silliness and saccharine center with occasional profundity. Cappa's voice is unquestionably present, and that includes the literal sense too, as he voices the four main characters and admits that 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."

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, manages to toe the line between heartfelt and ridiculous without falling into either completely — 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, and he did such a great job raising those boys that "HAHA, You Clowns" is primed to be Adult Swim's next classic series.

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.