Addictive App Called Chomp Gets You to Laugh at Your Own Face

Christoph Niemann wants to show me something funny.

Open the app and go to the fish-face scene, he tells me over the phone from his studio in Berlin. Niemann, an illustrator who regularly contributes to publications like The New Yorker, The New York Times, and WIRED, is guiding me through Chomp ($3.99), an app he's created with his developer partner Jon Huang.

I click on a tile with a hand-drawn fish, and live video of my face, captured by my phone's front-facing camera, appears on screen---only it’s upside down, positioned within the outline of a chubby, bug-eyed guppy. I study the screen for a moment, unsure of what I’m seeing. Then I get it. When positioned just right, my mouth becomes the fish’s mouth, and this fish---a hybrid of me and Niemann's illustration---is mirroring every word I say.

Niemann's right: The effect is funny, for all the same reasons looking at someone’s face upside down or adding googly-eyes to a celebrity on a magazine cover is funny. It's silly, bizarre, and unexpected. It's enough to make you giggle out loud.

Niemann illustrated 51 scenes for Chomp, each as charmingly absurd as the guppy. In one scene, your face replaces a piece of toast in a toaster. In another, it becomes a ping pong ball. My favorite shows my visage slowly dripping from a leaky faucet, only to become a messy deluge of facial features when I tap the screen.

Chomp is a fitting sequel to Niemann’s first app, Petting Zoo, in which you interact with a menagerie of animal illustrations by tapping, swiping, and pulling on them. (In one doodle, swiping upward on trotting weiner dog pulls his midsection into an accordion-like fold; in another, your swipes control a blast of air, letting you mess with the mane of a thoroughly unamused lion.) Chomp's control scheme is even simpler: just tap the illustration to elicit a response. Tap it repeatedly to trigger a series of unexpected animations. “There’s always this thin line between what you want and what actually happens, and in a way you want your expectations to be messed with,” Niemann says. “And I think that's most important with humor.”

You might have gathered that Chomp is a little ... unusual. It’s filled with dualities: It’s not quite a storybook, and not quite a video game. It's ostensibly for kids, but its creative appeal is universal. It’s definitely digital, but feels analog. The app lives at the intersection of all these things, which is one reason it’s such fun to play.