NEWS: What the Fuck Happened to CRACKED Magazine?

On Monday, Cracked Entertainment Inc. CEO / publisher Monty Sarhan made public that former Marvel Editor-in-Chief Tom DeFalco would take on the same role at the mag. Additionally, the company has named Sven Larsen the Associate Publisher. Larsen, also having worked at Marvel, brings his most recent publishing experience from Penguin Books, where he worked on marketing and sales for Financial Times and The Economist. Associate Editor duties will be handled by Justin Droms, whose online expertise has most recently been seen at Scholastic Books.

Jeff_Fries said:
I thought it's purpose was to make people thankful for Mad Magazine.

christopher said:
Some time ago, tucked behind copies of MAD magazine and the BIG BOOK OF PUZZLES sat CRACKED magazine. I’ve never seen anyone ever purchase one and its purpose was to make people secure in knowing that they were purchasing the very best gross out humor available. It appears that CRACKED magazine has not only been sold, but they have restocked the board with some pretty amazing executives.

Oh, and you just know how funny The Economist is.

Anyway: I've never even heard of cracked, so, uh, I don't have much to contribute. Sorry.

armyofrobots said:
I remember going to Megacon 2004 and they had a booth and this guy was handing out an issue of it. He was nuts. He was like "TELL YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT CRACKED! IT'S FUNNY!"

I read a page and threw it on the ground...

When I was much younger, I used to read Mad, because that's what young people do, and it never really made me laugh, but neither did "Weird Al" Yankovic and for a long time I listened to him too, pretty much for the same reason. I didn't have a subscription to Mad or anything, but generally, if there was one around, I would read it. And so it went.

When I was about ten or so, give or take, my family and I took a trip to Bermuda for a week or so. It was pretty cool, but there wasn't much for a ten year old to do. Thankfully, there was a newsstand in the hotel lobby, and I've always been pretty big on reading, so with some money in hand, I went there one morning, looking for something to read to alleviate the boredom. The novels were all the sort with the writer's name bigger than the title in all blocky gold letters (these are common vacation reading, apparently), so that was no good. Instead, to the magazine rack. It was also pretty sparse, so I bought an issue of the only thing that looked even okay - Cracked magazine.

I spent most of the downtime (such as it was) of that day reading Cracked, and being introduced to a whole new world, as it's said. It was fascinating to my young mind, reading this magazine which was sort of barely interesting and in no way at all humorous. Failures have always interested me more than successes, and I was looking one directly in its black-and-white face.

Under normal circumstances, I would have stopped after the first page, but the weight of boredom was too heavy to bear. Cracked might have been inept in just about every way, but it provided at least marginally more stimuli than staring at the walls or people watching (which is not as much fun when you are ten years old anyway, especially if the only people to watch are old). So I kept reading. And, having thoroughly read that, I went back to the newsstand and bought another issue, this one, I think, an annual. And so it continued - they had some bizarre Cracked backlog that I never understood, either that or Cracked released a lot of specials that month, but eventually I wound up with four or five Cracked magazines and I read them exhaustively, because I was just that fucking bored. I was not dramatically less bored after reading them, but I was pretty sure that they were better than nothing, although you should probably not quote me on that.

I was also very much taken by the naive charm the magazine had; in many of its features, it would make a thinly-veiled reference to Mad, along with the implication that said publication was inferior. This was probably the only funny thing in the entire magazine. Mad might have been horribly unfunny, but it was surely less so than Cracked. This much was apparent to me even at that young age. Yet still they plugged on, doomed forever to be the nerd that gets beaten up on by the slightly less nerdy kid and yet keeps coming back for more. I respected that. Certainly didn't admire it, but I respected it.

So that is why I am writing this. I would like to take this time, this entry, to salute the magazine that kept me from going insane (but not by a very broad margin) during time spent in the hotel in Bermuda. I say, hats off to you, Cracked. You have always been there, a not necessarily welcome but nevertheless present constant in our young lives. You have served tirelessly as the unintentional straight man to Mad, making it look not necessarily good but certainly not as bad as you. You are something we all, no matter how different, can treasure as a shared experience - people from all walks of life have, in common, fond memories of not buying you. And you have provided, I assume, at least some sort of gratification for all of the theoretical people who must be buying your magazine for it to still get published and circulated. Cracked is no hero, but it is still unsung (and justifiably so), and today, I wish to give it the limited accolade it deserves. So take a bow, Cracked. You live in all our hearts as the magazine that, through great effort and ceaseless dedication, has made the undeniable achievement of coming in second in a competition of two.

eurisko said:
they used to have the mascot with blonde hair in what appeared to be a janitors uniform with a baseball hat... correct?

Skankin_D said:
I grew up on Cracked.

Fuck Mad.

fredfarnance said:
Does anyone else remember the 3rd competitor in the Satire magazine world? Crazy Magazine, was in my admitedly fuzzy memory, the most over the top of the 3.

negative said:

Only in the sense that they referenced it on the Simpsons. Principal Skinner is rewarding Bart for his recent work as a hall monitor by giving him anything he wants from the school's seized property room. He says something akin to "We have Mad, Cracked and even the occasional Crazy Magazine".

Thank you

P.S. I could probably find some old tattered copies of Cracked in my Dad's basement.

eternalidiot said:
I used to read both Cracked and MAD. Those were the days.