Cracked.com

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Cracked.com, founded in 2005, is a website which purports to be a spin off from the defunct Cracked Magazine, founded in 1958. In practice, it has little or no tie to the original, having merely bought the trademark name after Cracked had long since ceased publication in its original format. In many ways, it is more a knock-off or imitation of The Onion‍'‍s style than that of the printed Mad and Cracked of yesteryear.

Relying largely on (ostensibly) humourous list articles, Cracked has become rather famous on the Internet. Its lists, which can be written by anyone, are rooted in fact (usually) and coated in humour, dispensing interesting historical and scientific trivia surrounded by dick jokes (always). It has about a half dozen full-time columnists on payroll, who dish out weekly and biweekly articles on serious subjects from the cultural effects of the Internet, to Choose Your Own Adventure Gonzo-styled articles about visiting the zoo while on an amount of drugs capable of killing most men, to action reporting while getting kidnapped by pirates.

Small-time celebrities including Seanbaby and Michael Ian Black have written articles for Cracked, with Seanbaby now part of the column staff. The website plays host to numerous Internet sketch groups, webcomics (such as Subnormality, White Ninja and Daisy Owl), and has its own caption contest. It has taken on an encyclopedic "Cracked Topics" project, where Cracked readers submit articles on a variety of subjects, from Steven Seagal to Punk Rock (including one about TV Tropes).

A print version of the "new" Cracked existed briefly, in 2005, but is no longer published. For tropes related to the original mag, see Cracked.

For a rundown of who's who on the current column writers:

With frequent non-columnist posters:

  • Kristi Harrison (also editor)(2007-)

Formerly:

  • Ross Wolinsky (2006-2008)
  • Ian Fortey (2007-2010)

They also have video content. The videos range from cultural to just random topics:

On top of the regular columnists, Cracked accepts articles from anybody who wants to write one: all you have to do is create a forum account and then post in this thread to get access to a forum where you can pitch your own potential articles. As such, some of their articles were written by denizens of TV Tropes.

If you're going to add tropes that have to do with Agents of Cracked please put them here.

Reading and/or general association with Cracked.com will also make you irresistibly sexually attractive.[citation needed]


Tropes used in Cracked.com include:

A

"Let's face it, cities can be terrifying. They are, after all, filled with people like us. The modern metropolis is a teeming hive of strung-out dope heads, rapists, home invaders and fine regional cuisine."

"We tend to find Spider-Man easier to identify with than other superheroes. He's not an alien, like Superman, or the son of a major Norse god, like Thor, or a Canadian, like Wolverine."

We are not blaming bad teachers for Adolf Hitler, Timothy McVeigh, and Spencer Pratt

We love the way the writer crammed in every scary word they could think of: rape, war, cancer, emphysema, respiratory distress, anemia, constipation, irritability, blindness, Canada.

We tend to think of ourselves as the smartest animals on Earth. After all, we've built such technological wonders such as the internet, the internal combustion engine, and sneakers that light up when you take a step

[The rebels] were trapped, outnumbered, ill-equipped, poorly trained, freezing and starving, and it was raining.

"Where do you go when your name is already Staff Sgt. Max fucking Fightmaster? Oh, wait, there you go. Just make "Fucking" an official part of the name. We think it's almost impossible to say the name without it anyway."

B

"Perhaps you could pretend the people out in the street begging for food are orcs!"

C

D

When Buddy found out his bassist Waylon Jennings wasn't going to be on the plane, he said to him: "Well, I hope your ol' bus freezes up." Jennings ominously replied: "Well, I hope your ol' plane crashes." A clap of thunder was heard in the background.

E

David Wong: [W]e turned the ["How I Got My Camera" viral video] over to the 30-man Cracked.com video analysis team, who spent six months processing every pixel of the original upload. After enhancing the image to a level of clarity more than 6,000 times that of the original, they reported that there was a prominent watermark for a site called wittkopp.net in the upper right.

F

G

H

I

"I typed in porn, and porn came up! I typed in breakfast, and porn came up! It's the perfect system!"

J

K

  • Kick the Son of a Bitch: Robert Brockway mentions killing an old woman for her eyeglasses in Fallout: New Vegas, having taken the Four-Eyes trait and didn't find glasses anywhere else; however the woman sold a pregnant woman into slavery and would have been killed in a quest anyway.
  • The Krampus: Mentioned here.

L

"In Marvel world, the odds of winding up with super powers are less than half the chance of being hit by lightning (although to be fair, being hit by lightning in the Marvel universe would probably give you superpowers).

M

N

"[A]nd Jack O'Brien plus a huge bag of X gave us a Cracked office party that we're still not allowed to blog about."

(No, we didn't get the names mixed up -- Clyde is the video game villain, Wizard is the cabbie. Go figure.)

O

P

Q

R

The text does not mention whether [the sculptures] have evolved cavernous maws and a dark, endless hunger, so we are forced to assume they have.

...which means if you put a jellyfish in the space shuttle, and it fired its stingers at the moment of takeoff, it would travel back in time [citation needed].

    • The word "Baffling" is often used in titles of articles.
    • Similar to their love of Roosevelt is their love of Nikola Tesla, and their complete and utter ball-crushing hatred of Thomas Edison. Like Roosevelt, this is because the things you could make up about either man in favor of their position on said man are only slightly less exaggerated than real life.
    • Have we mentioned Australia yet? Well, Cracked does a lot...
    • Can be taken to exasperating extremes when the writers start taking potshots at other cultures' idiosyncrasies for the sake of a laugh. One or two jokes is one thing, but... well, see for yourself. Worse, the cultural jokes aren't just annoying, they're frequently wrong.
    • Ke$ha's debauchery is becoming a fairly common theme...
    • "Gary Busey crazy" was often used when mentioning something they considered insane. Often including an image of the man himself.
    • Whenever they are in doubt of what picture they should use for an article, they will frequently use reuse the same photo of a woman's large cleavage.
    • Several articles have been devoted to the over-the-top mean, weird, or just plain laughable antics of world dictators, especially North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il.
    • They also love spiders.
    • Also, they have a running gag where they'll explain that X does (action) because fuck Y, that's why.
    • Additionally, Al Gore invented the internet.
    • And among the columnists, Brockway's drug use, Soren's social superiority, Swaim's freaky kinks, Dan's nicknaming, and Bulchoz's Canadian roots.
    • They also tend to bring up the infamous "I'm Han Solo" from Kinect Star Wars.

S

BOD: You know, I remember reading somewhere that there are only two truly meaningful things you can do with your doppleganger when you're locked in a room. You can fight them... Or f*** them.

  • Dan takes a fighting stance*

BOD: Wrong answer.

The teen unemployment rate is 27.3 percent, an all-time high that's staggering compared to the national American rate of 6 percent. We are officially going through the Muppet Babies reboot of the Great Depression.

T

"TV Tropes is a veritable black hole of hyperlinks, each leading further into the center of oblivion. The entire site is made up of a community that spends its life collecting patterns and commonalities between fictional worlds. It applies names to every plot device, every story arc and every cinematic tool ever captured by a camera and then links them to one another. The result is like being in the mind of a paranoid schizophrenic deciphering hidden codes in newspapers. Clicking on one link will ensure that you click on another, and another until you have lost your way back home and forgotten who you are."

U

V

Soon, it wasn't uncommon for him to introduce himself at a party and be greeted with "Oh, you're Butterscotch Dinosaur Pussy!"

W

Y

Z

  1. ↑ Blueness not in original; that would have just been cruel.
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