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YMMV / Cracked

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From the website:

  • Adaptation Displacement: "Hey, that site with those funny lists used to be a magazine?"
  • Anvilicious: Has its own page.
  • Archive Binge: Those little "Recommended" links at the bottom of each page are diabolical. Even worse now with the "This day in Cracked" sidebar that shows articles released on that day, going back to the site's formation.
  • Audience-Alienating Era: The disastrous aftermath of the "pivot to video" trend turned the site into a hollowed out husk, with all of the original staff out the door and a skeleton crew churning out low-effort, algorithm-driven content designed to clickbait and be shared on social media.
  • Broken Base:
    • The Photoplasty contest, an old tradition of the site, as of late 2012 or so. The main reason for the divide is an increasingly large number of the contests being 'true fact' style contests that amount to posting some fact over a picture. Themes tend to run either into the pop culture spectrum (little known facts about movies or music) or shocking facts like statistics on corporations or social justice issues. Some people at first were divisive in that they preferred the contests made in its original style, that is, doing an humorous photoshop of a picture; but due to the information from the 'true fact' contests being genuinely informative, that reaction died down rather quickly. A significantly more divisive issue later arose when the fact-based ones started to feature facts that had already been mentioned previously in Cracked articles. A common comment in these contests is posting a list of the Cracked articles in which the facts were previously mentioned. The flames rekindled in February 2016, when Cracked staff announced that the older "traditional" photoplasties were losing views, and fast, prompting the staff to start thinking about retiring "traditionals" entirely and just run "true fact" ones.
    • There is a divide between the fans that come strictly for the humor, and the fans that come to be entertained and informed. Often, one set lambasts the other when they complain about an article's mistakes and misleading claims in the comments.
    • Luke McKinney and especially J. F. Sargent for their polarizing social justice articles, leading to frequent accusations of white knighting. Sargent also gets hate for his occasional lapses in research and frequent use of his columns to vent his contemptuous opinion of stuff he doesn't like: Contested Sequels, This Very Wiki, and all of their fans. Meanwhile, McKinney is often seen as trying way too hard to make obscure female superheroes look cool. Even some non-radical feminists think he's a bit of a tool, due to his contributions to feminism amounting to little more than reading comics and watching movies. Nonetheless, they have their fans, due to their bitingly sarcastic sense of humor and willingness to direct it at segments of the fandom many consider acceptable targets, and in Luke's case handling other topics much better, especially science ones.
    • Dan O'Brien is generally pretty funny, but he tends to recycle jokes, and as a self-admitted Fan Boy, has very rigid and narrow opinions about his franchises of choice (Die Hard and Spider-Man in particular), to the point of expressing sneering contempt for anyone who doesn't share them.
  • Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Don't Shoot the Message: Some readers argue that Cracked's increasingly large number of preachy, poorly researched articles do more harm than good to the causes they purport to help, a sentiment that became increasingly noted in the comment sections of these articles.
  • Draco in Leather Pants: Numerous articles try to convince their readers that fictional villains were secretly more heroic than the actual heroes. More often than not, these examples usually rely on cherry-picked information that's quickly debunked in the comments section.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse:
    • Robert Evans is not a part of Cracked's official columnists, but his "insider" articles are one of the more popular contributions to the site, and most readers appreciate his ability to track down and interview people who has very interesting stories to tell, and edit them with enough gentle humor to overcome Too Bleak, Stopped Caring for sometimes truly horrible subject matter. Few of his fans were surprised when, after leaving Cracked, Evans became a successful journalist, parlaying his talent into podcasting.
    • Chris Bucholz and Felix Clay, for being consistently comedy-oriented even as the site underwent Cerebus Syndrome. Clay overlaps with Memetic Badass because he's proven to be willing to do a wide range of things (rarely pleasant) to write his articles.
    • Mara Wilson has only written a few articles for Cracked, but they've all been well-received by the readers.
    • "Roger", the Cool Old Guy that serves as the spokesperson of the "If X are honest" series, played by Jack Hunter. Many viewers say that they enjoy this series even more than After Hours and want to see him more often. When he was fired along with the rest of the video crew, fans still miss him to this day. When the video series resumed in late July 2021, many rejoiced with his return.
    • Seanbaby. A look at the comments on his increasingly-rare articles shows that quite a few readers show up just to read his work.
    • Alex Hanton and Ryan Menezes. Many readers felt that their articles are the only ones that kept the funny spirit of the website alive in 2020.
  • Estrogen Brigade: Soren has a MASSIVE one.
  • Fridge Brilliance: "5 Movie And TV 'Plot Holes' That Aren't Actually Plot Holes" is a list of examples of this.
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • It was after the fact, but in a list of "5 Ways To Enjoy Terrible Winter Olympic Events", it mentions that luge and skeleton is easy, because it's like a sled, right after the death of Nodar Kumaritashvili during a crash while luging. It was probably an unfortunate coincidence that the article was posted at that time since it takes a while for them to actually post them. Which, in a ridiculously meta twist, was Harsher in Hindsight itself, due to the same thing happening in Agents of Cracked, involving the death of Nicholas Cage.
    • The 5 Major Cities Most Likely to Be Spectacularly Destroyed was printed on the 15th April 2013 - just hours before the bomb attack in Boston. Cracked actually acknowledged this and pulled out the article hours after it was posted, for several days.
    • The 5 Worst Deaths Written for Great Characters (And Why), a 2010 article that features Corporal Hicks' death in Alien³ as one of the deaths, and includes an extra jab at Alien: Resurrection with the line "Don't worry, Michael [Biehn], we're pretty sure you got out of the [Alien] franchise just in time." Come 2013 where Biehn ends up reprising his role as Hicks in the universally loathed Aliens: Colonial Marines, which retcons the latter's death with an Ass Pull of epic proportions that was arguably much more disrespectful to the audience than his "original" death.
    • In The 10 Most Awesome Movies Hollywood Ever Killed, an article written way back in 2007, David Wong brings up the fact that M. Night Shyamalan was once in talks to direct the movie adaptation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, and actually opines that, "Even those of you who don't like the director have to admit that he probably could have made a more interesting first film than Chris Columbus crapped out." This was, of course, several years before anyone had any idea that Shyamalan actually would get to direct the first installment of a movie series based on a certain other popular fantasy series. Said adaptation is now widely considered one of the worst films ever made, and is universally loathed by the fan base.
    • "5 Movie Romances That Won't Last (According to Science)" predicts that Han Solo and Princess Leia's relationship is doomed to failure, and that Han will never be able to give up smuggling since it's the only life he knows. As we learn in Episode VII: The Force Awakens, they actually do eventually separate after their son turns to the Dark Side, and Han actually does return to smuggling—where it quickly becomes clear that he's past his prime, and he's already swindled so many people that no one trusts him anymore. They also never get a chance to rekindle their relationship, as Han is killed just as they're on the verge of reconciling.
    • One of the entries for a photoplasty focused on highly absurd potential twists in movies portrayed Captain America as a Deep Cover Agent for Hydra, the joke being that he's usually such a Ideal Hero that the idea of him being Evil All Along is ridiculous. Come 2016 where Nick Spencer would use that exact twist for 616!Cap in his run and the first issue alone has received near universal backlash from casual and diehard fans alike, it becomes much more uncomfortable than anything.
    • On July 24, 2017, After Hours introduces a new crew, but make it incredibly clear that the original crew will be around and doing just as many videos. Many jokes were made about how the crew will still be coming to the diner, forever, continuing their discussions. Except in two months, Soren Bowie announced that he's leaving Cracked, and in December, the rest of the original crew was laid off without any warning.
    • The final episode of Obsessive Pop Culture Disorder ends with its usual Couch Gag of a humorous fake preview of the content of the next episode, in this case, an episode about the show getting a sponsorship and how that would be a great idea for any large corporation. Turns out that would've been incredibly useful since in a few days Daniel would be unceremoniously laid off, along with almost all of the creators of video content.
    • In the 2013 article of the "5 Hilarious Reasons Publishers Rejected Classic Best-Sellers", Dr. Seuss' And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street was #3 on the list, because it stated that all 27 publishers (before Vanguard Press) dismissed the poem for being too different and silly in the winter of 1936-1937. Eight years after this article was published (March 2, 2021), Mulberry Street was one of the six Dr. Seuss books that were pulled from publication due to "hurtful and wrong imagery". It seems that after almost 85 years, these 27 publishers were Right for the Wrong Reasons, because the word they were searching for (and unaware of at the time) was "racist".
    • How Companies Really Do Corporate Layoffs. Sixteen months after this was published, Cracked itself suffered this, and everyone featured in that video is gone.
    • J.F Sargent became a one-person Broken Base among the readership due to his vocal championing of social justice issues and feminism. While your mileage on the validity of his arguments overall might vary, they became a lot harder to take seriously when he was accused by various people of abusive behaviour towards women in his personal relationships.
  • Heartwarming in Hindsight: In their September 2018 article "4 Ways Corporations Are Turning Us Into Jerks", Cracked criticized Disney's decision to fire James Gunn from Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3 due to pressure from internet mobs, arguing that his jokes made before he was hired by Disney/Marvel were falsely equated with Roseanne Barr's racist tweets made during the short-lived Roseanne revival on ABC. In March 2019, Disney announced that they would be rehiring Gunn for Vol. 3.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Hype Aversion:
    • Cracked's in-article plugs for their De-Textbook (mostly added in by editors) became so common that, more often than not, the top comments for any given article utilizing them consisted of complaints about it.
    • Their article titles more and more frequently use certain phrases to entice a click, to the point that it's very easy to get sick of it. "6 Myths About X (You Probably Believe)" and "5 Things You Didn't Know About X" are huge offenders. Worse, sometimes the articles are actually funny and interesting, while other times they're just lazy and derivative.
  • Magazine Decay: Not so much "decay" as a shift, since the content is generally still good, but the website seems to get less and less humor-based every day.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • Fuck you. Buy a butter dish. Explanation
    • No shit, Sherringford. Explanation
    • Title Guy: Explanation
    • They both get affected by lava. Explanation
    • Poor Man's Upvote Explanation
  • Memetic Badass:
  • Memetic Molester: A Running Gag is that writing for Cracked can turn you into one.
  • Memetic Psychopath: Popsicle Pete. "NONE OF YOU ARE SAFE".
  • Misaimed Fandom:
    • "5 Reasons Why Women Will Rule the Future." It's (hopefully) just a joke, but judging from some of the comments, not everybody saw it that way.
    • There's a large amount of people that take the writers' harmless (if sometimes a little mean-spirited) jabs at various fandoms seriously and agree. The most blatant example would have to be their various stabs at the Star Wars' Expanded Universe.
    • The writers themselves have fallen victim to this on occasion, like in David Wong's 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person, which uses Alec Baldwin's scene from Glengarry Glen Ross to describe how one might become a "better person", when David Mamet has openly said he intended that scene to show what was wrong with rampant capitalism and cutthroat sales tactics. More specifically: Wong's point in the article ultimately boils down to "You are only the sum total of the valuable skills that you can provide the world." A valid message, but he apparently missed the fact that Glengarry Glen Ross is all about salesmen knowingly selling worthless real estate to gullible customers, and Alec Baldwin's big speech is meant to inspire them to sell more worthless real estate. The whole point of the speech is that the salesmen only care about how much they can outdo each other, and never question whether or not their work is valuable. Sure, Death of the Author and all that, but it's still a fundamental misunderstanding of context. He also shows this towards the blog that he says he got the analysis off of; if you actually read it, the quote he provides in the article cut off the previous two sentences that Baldwin's character clearly doesn't believe a word of it and that if you take it seriously you've misunderstood the scene.
    • As mentioned under the "Draco in Leather Pants", the writers will argue the villains of a work are secretly the real good guys. Often times, they completely miss the point of the characters involved such as arguing Sauron was fighting for Orc rights.
  • More Popular Spin Off: Of the magazine. The website is both more popular and well-known (see Adaptation Displacement and Surprisingly Improved Sequel).
  • Nausea Fuel:
  • Paranoia Fuel:
  • Periphery Demographic:
    • While Cracked is an American site, with much of its content revolving around American culture, a substantial number of readers are from other countries.
    • A fair number of people enjoy Cracked not for the comedic articles, but the more introspective and philosophical articles. And while they're never taken seriously, there are quite a few scientific and technology based articles which are actually rather informative.
  • Retroactive Recognition: A strange example: one Photoshop contest featured a joke ad made with a stock photo that featured someone who looked very much like Soren Bowie. A few days later, Soren made an article explaining that yes, it was him in the photo (he'd made it during one of his previous jobs).
  • Seasonal Rot:
    • Many fans dislike the fact that the site has become less comedy-oriented over time. By 2013, a lot of articles were more like opinion pieces or philosophical treatises than humorous stories or lists of factual information (like bizarre animals, or legends, or suchlike) presented in a funny way. Accusations in 2014 that the site was becoming host to Soap Box Sadies with political axes to grind didn't help their case. By 2016, readers noted a sharp increase in political articles, all of them with a strong progressive bent that comes across as Anvilicious, even to those who agree with much of the content. Even articles on pop culture haven't been free of politics: Many writers will add in a jab toward gun owners, evangelical Christians, or social conservatives in an article about deconstructing Hogwarts or the Marvel universe. Not helping matters was the 2016 US presidential election; two days after the results were in, every single article that ran that day was about politics. For those who go to Cracked for a distraction from political issues, this did not bode well, and the mission since then seems to have become turning the site into a marginally lighter-hearted version of The Huffington Post. They backed off slightly on the volume of political articles in 2018, at least to the point that a day or two could go by without any polemics on the front page, but by 2020 it was back with a vengeance.
    • As of 2024, the bulk of content is either pictorials recycled from older material or "This Thing You Enjoy is Actually Racist/Sexist/Homophobic and You're Evil For Enjoying It" screeds that may as well have been leached off of Tumblr, with truly new or original content becoming rare.
    • A lot of people accused many newer article titles of being clickbait.note  It doesn't help that many of the titles use attention-grabbing words/phrases like "Mind Blowing", "You Won't Believe", and "Horrifying" even if it isn't an accurate description of the article.
    • The increasing number of articles that come out daily. Around 2018, it used to be five. Come 2020, with the exception of a few days that only has three articles, at least 12 articles are popped out on a daily basis with majority of them being only a few paragraphs long instead of the list based format longtime readers are used to, and some others being a single section from an older article converted in pictofact format, resulting in accusations of clickbait while making daily reading less enjoyable and more of a chore. Also, from 2020 onwards, pictofacts which aren't recycled from older (non-pictofact) articles have their #1 entry being a link to older articles instead of a proper entry, which some of the readers reacted poorly too.
  • Squick:
  • Subculture of the Week: They've been accused of writing articles like this, most infamously when it comes to anime fans and Bronies. In fact, if you look at the Dethroning Moments subpage, you'll quickly see a pattern.
  • Surprisingly Improved Sequel: For something that started out as a cheap MAD Magazine rip-off, the Retool to being a list-based humor website has really helped them a lot.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
    • The site's redesign that was introduced in late June 2013 originally prompted this response from a lot of its users.
    • The site using subscriptions in mid 2017 for exclusive features turned off many people. Later on, even the simple ability to upvote and downvote comments were locked behind the subscription paywall, which pissed off a lot of people.
    • 2019 saw them remove the comment section entirely from most inherently controversial articles. Needless to say, imposing a "no backtalk" policy on an audience that thrives on backtalk has not been very popular, and other articles are full of comments from readers unimpressed with this particular bit of editorial cowardice. As of 2021, the comment sections appear to be gone entirely. When asked online, it is stated that it is now locked to only people who logged in to the website itself.
  • This Is Your Premise on Drugs: The Choose Your Own Drug Fueled Misadventure series of stories by Robert Brockway involve plots on a lethal overdose of drugs. Literally.
  • Ugly Cute: The Jerboa as seen in 6 Animals That Look Like Drunken Combinations of Other Ones. It's a species of a tiny fuzzy things with bunny-like ears and big eyes. But they also look like they have only two (hairless, thin, long) limbs,note  backward-bending knees, and a rat-like tail. This causes them both cute and unusually creepy at the same time.
  • What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The 10 Most Perverted Old School Video Games brings this up a few times.
  • The Woobie: ALF is considered this in articles that discuss his show.

From the magazine:

  • Harsher in Hindsight: Take a look at the main page image. Back in 1975, that could easily be Played for Laughs (and was indeed a dig at the then-current big-budget disaster movie Earthquake). After 9/11? Try looking at the plane hitting what looks like the WTC, complete with the all-too familiar ring of smoke and fire around the tower's midsection, without cringing.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: A 1984 issue featured several parodies of recurring features in MAD, including two Don Orehek comics that spoofed Don Martin. Six years later, Don Martin quit MAD and started working for Cracked.
  • Magazine Decay: The constant Executive Meddling in the later days, followed by the switch to a copycat of Maxim, followed by the outright termination of the mag.
  • Nausea Fuel: The last few years of the mag were rife with bodily function jokes, including a whole article on different types of farts and another on different types of puking.
  • Padding: The 2000s issues were rife with this: repeats from classic issues, a second Godzilla parody more than two years after the fact, several song parodies...
  • Retroactive Recognition:
    • Bill Wray did some art for the magazine in the late 1980s. He would later do work on The Ren & Stimpy Show and illustrate the long-running "Monroe and..." cartoon for MAD.
    • Columnist and blogger Lenore Skenazy (World's Worst Moms) wrote for Cracked for a short time in the 1990s.
  • So Bad, It's Good: Let's face it, most of the "jokes" were lame...
    • Narm Charm: ... But the very same lameness that made you groan is also what made the magazine funny.
  • Ugly Cute: Sylvester P. Smythe evolved into this once John Severin started doing almost all of the covers.

From the TV show

For the audience reactions to the TV show that's unrelated but of the same name, click here.

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