CRACKING THE LISTS

I’m a fan of the hilarious lists at McSweeney’s, my only objection being that they so rarely publish my submissions.

But, then again, that’s why I have a blog: to publish shit that nobody else cares to.

There are other Humorous Lists out there on the Inter-Webby-Net, however. I recently (that is, last night) discovered Cracked.com, home of some very interesting and amusing lists. Cracked, my Esteemed Readers will no doubt be aware, was the venerable competitor of MAD magazine, the only humor rag that ever gave Harvey Kurtzman’s brain-child a real run for its money.

Back in the day, you either read MAD or Cracked, just as you would be a Beatles fan or an Elvis fan. Few people straddled the fence separating the two camps.

Me, I was a MAD reader, which probably accounts for a good part of my twisted outlook on life. My cronies and I looked down upon Cracked as a poor imitation of MAD, which in fact it was at the time. Even their own people admit it:

Editor Terry Bisson later recalled, “The whole company was about lowball imitations. The publisher, Robert Sproul, wanted to put out some imitations of western, romance and astrology mags, and I was hired (at about age 27) to put them together because of my romance mag experience... The pseudomags did pretty well (this was a very low end market).”

Cracked is now defunct as a magazine (or “mazagine,” as they playfully titled it), but it has been reinvented as a humor website. And it has some chops.

Here are a few of the things that gave me a chuckle. Check ’em out:

• The Top 25 Men Who Look Like Old Lesbians
  
  
• The 25 Most Baffling Toys From Around the World
  
  
• The 6 Most Unsettling Medication Side Effects
  
  
• 5 Kick-Ass Sci-Fi Apocalypses (That Could Actually Happen)
  
  
• 8 More Superheroes Who Are Also Douchebags
  (This last one is a link to the International Society of Supervillains site.)

Of course, the advantage of a website, as opposed to a conventional print ’zine, is that you can include links...which in turn take you to yet more narrischkeit. Like this Japanese advertisement for a potty-training Assistive Device...



Ya gotta give the Japanese credit. They don’t seem to have a lot of our Western hangups about dealing with Bodily Functions. Which should make my upcoming trip with Elder Daughter interesting. Picture me, at large in a nation of potential crapbloggers! Scary, don’tcha think?