Mad vs Cracked

If you were growing up as a dorky white kid in the suburbs during the late 80s/early 90s, there was one true bastion of comedy: Mad Magazine. I will never understand why legions of us were so devoted to 90 black and white pages of bizarre movie parodies and psychiatrist jokes, but all of us were. You didn't question it; you just went with it. As recently as the age of 17, I still had an enormous box of old issues of Mad in my closet. I tried to throw them away, but I just couldn't. Maybe I secretly hoped that the key to popularity in college would be a top notch archive of comedy magazines with original covers. I think the fact that I am sitting here, typing all of this out, rather than partying on a houseboat with Star Jones and all-you-can-eat guacamole dip proves just how wrong that idea turned out to be.

Like most things I get into, I got really into Mad magazine. I got so into Mad, I realized that one issue a month just wasn't cutting it. I soon turned to buying these archive books of Mad. These even worse than the regular issues because they were all composed of really old material. They books were full of jokes about Spiro Agnew and CB radios, and being 10 years old, I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. Did that deter me? Hell no, I read on with gusto. The fact that my friends and family looked on in bewilderment whenever I'd start recycling zingers from Mad about The French Connection only drove me further. I realized I needed something besides my Mad subscription and the books to satisfy me.

So, in a sad move, I subscribed to Cracked. Cracked was a humor magazine that was exactly like Mad, except it was a lot cheaper and, if possible, less funny. It was the Sam's Choice to Mad's Coca Cola. If the humor in Mad was inaccessible and hit-or-miss, then the humor in Cracked was like trying to read a bunch of Family Circus cartoons with every other pane taken out. To make it worse, I couldn't even understand a lot of the words; it was like a large part of the magazine had been written in a foreign language. I guess those words were Yiddish, I don't know. All I know is that a lot of the magazine was like, "What are you kvetching about, you schmuck? What a nebish!" I had no idea what half of every sentence meant, as the suburbs of Fort Worth, TX are not known for their thriving Yiddish communities. I struggled with the weirdness for quite some time, then I decided to give up and go with it. If Cracked said these were funny words, I would use them as such and impress the hell out of everyone who hadn't gotten onboard the Cracked train yet.

And so, the first day of this master plan, I was sitting in science class on the floor. I hadn't had a chance to use any of the words from Cracked yet, but I was ready to unleash one at a moment's notice. This girl started to encroach on my space, and I decided to go ahead and tear into her. I picked a word that I took to be an insult, cleared my throat, and then proclaimed, "Back off, you schmendrick!" Rather than have the class erupt in laughter, everyone sat there silently, shaking their heads. People avoided me for the rest of the day out of the fear that I would unleash a bizarre, gibberish put-down on them. I went home that day and knew I had to break my addiction to Cracked.

It hurt to get rid of all of those magazines, but I had to make that sacrifice in order to shed my status as social leper. Thus, while my brief dalliance with Cracked ended in disaster, there's also a sense of triumph to it. I say triumph because I am absolutely certain that one day, this will be commemmorated as the strangest outburst ever in an Arlington, TX elementary school classroom.