A Requiem for Cracked.com
Gather ‘round children because it’s time for Uncle Travie to tell you about a time when the internet wasn’t just three websites posting screenshots from each other generating “content” to be “monetized” via an “algorithm”. There was a time in which the internet was personal and created by passionate, interesting people who had ideas that they wanted to share with the world. Most of these websites were glorified journals – years before the term “blog” became a thing – where regular folks just told the stories of their lives. Sometimes you would find gems, and sometimes you would find boredom.
Sometimes you would find super sexy, internet famous, cam girls … and then end up meeting them over pizza at your friend’s apartment.
And then we went and watched the re-release of The Exorcist together at the cinema next to the Winchester Mystery house.
That really did happen.
Hi Malice!
Early internet infamy was a weird, weird, fucking thing.
From 2007 – 2017 I would be willing to wager that 75% of the non-porn links that garnered any sort of attention across this world wide web started at Cracked.com. It was a juggernaut that meant a lot to a lot of people before its corporate masters rendered it a shadow of what it once was in the name of almighty profit.
Why Cracked of all fucking things?
Cracked had something that hadn’t been seen in a very long time – potential.
It took the the popular concept of the listicle and injected it with every drunken nerd conversation that you had with your friends at a bar. It enhanced these errant nerd concepts with deep thinking about the world and reality of our most popular fictional characters. They brought a college essay level of research to the absolutely dumbest of topics. There was no corner of pop-culture that they didn’t attempt to dissect in order to, in a weird ass way, entertain and educate you.
Their writer program, fostered in their forums, helped to raise a generation of comedy writers. This was something that had never been done before in this way. It was evocative of old journalism schools. Cracked developed their own in house style and style guide; but they were open to letting anyone pitch an idea and then helping them mold that idea into something that fit into their ecosystem. Then, once it was polished and fleshed out with the help of their staff, they published it…and PAID the writers for it. It was an unheard of system that should not have worked; but it did. Freelancers who posted regularly sometimes moved up to being staff writers. Forum members who were good at helping edit a concept became editors for the newbies. Cracked created the first comedy factory of the 21st century, and, they were successful.
You only have to look at what their alumni have done since the site laid off all of their prolific contributors to see that the pipeline of talent they generated was second to none.
Dan O’Brien – six time Emmy winning senior writer for Lat Week Tonight with John Oliver.
Soren Bowie – Senior writer for American Dad.
Jason Pargin (David Wong) – New York Time best selling author.
Jack O’Brien – no relation to DOB – host of the daily Zeitgeist podcast.
Cody Johnston – Some More News – a more in depth, deeper researched version of The Daily Show with John Stewart.
Alex Schmidt – Secretly incredibly fascinating.
Robert Brockway – NY Times best selling author and founder of 1-900-hotdog
Michael Swaim – Screenwriter and founder of Small Beans
At its height the Cracked bench of talent was extremely deep and multifaceted.
When Cracked – along with every other site on the internet – pivoted to video – based on extremely incorrect data from social media powerhouses like Facebook – is when they really started to shine in a new way that could have been their legacy.
If private equity and predatory capitalism hadn’t gotten their profit boner stuck up their own ass Cracked could have been if not the next SNL, at minimum the next SCTV.
After Hours could have been a three camera sitcom, or it could have stayed in its original format and been a sign post of our pop culture landscape. It was so popular that they did a livestream of an unproduced script during Covid and raised over $15k for charity … and then had to do ANOTHER last episode to pay off the promise they made during their charity live stream.
OPCD (my personal favorite) could have been a monthly segment on the state of Pop Culture as it continued to divide exponentially across four point seven billion different channels. Imagine Weekend Update – but nerdier.
ROM.COM could have been a feature film starring Matthew McConaughey in the vein of How to Lose a Guy In Ten Days.
HELL Star Trek: Below Decks was done by Cracked as Starship Icarus YEARS before it ended up on Paramount Plus.
All of this to say that they were a Powerhouse of comedy creation that, if given the proper budget and latitude, could have risen beyond “Internet nerds” and become the next great testing ground of comedic talent like The Groundlings.
But the world these days runs on the never ending engine of increased profit on a quarterly basis. If executives aren’t going to make their bonus then it is time for short sighted decisions and the expense of long term planning. Such is the way of all things is this predatory capitalist hellscape.
Why do you care so much though?
“Uncle Travie,” you say out loud confusing everyone around you, “why are you obsessed with a website?”
First of all; don’t. Don’t call me that. I can call myself that as a cheeky old man from the early days of the internet; but when you say it it sounds creepy and weird. It’s akin to calling me Daddy Trav and that … man that is just too much.
Second of all – because as a long time nerd it made me feel not so alone.
You have to understand that a lot of the nerd things that are considered cool today were fodder for verbal and physical abuse when I was a kid. I was one of the only kids growing up that read comic books. I had a favorite X-Man (Gambit) and knew who made him look the coolest (Jim Lee). I had a Spider-Man jacket that I got as a Christmas present from a local comic book store, I LOVED it. People at school used it as an excuse to make fun of me. People often times make fun of nerds for gatekeeping their passions; but I can tell you that it is a very particular type of wound to watch the once niche thing that you were into, and bullied for, become so popular that the people that bullied you are now fans. If there were some sort of universal wedgie calculator I’m pretty sure that I am owed a LOT recompense.
By the time that Cracked started hitting its stride I had been writing the same type of absurdist comedy on the internet for almost a decade. I saw a great machine that was built around the exact thing that I loved doing and hoped, desperately, to somehow be a part of it. These were, unbeknownst to them, my internet brethren. At Cracked there were people my age who were not only writing about the same weird pop culture ephemera that I was – they were making a living doing it. If I had been single I would have dedicated an unholy amount of time trying make my way onto the Cracked staff. The internet helped me find my people and they were STARS of nerdom.
Also there were the parasocial relationships.
This part is not super healthy but I can almost guarantee that I’m not the only one who felt this way. Let me explain.
Before apps and algorithms you had bookmarked list of sites that you checked regularly. You started your day going down the list of your favorite sites to see who had made new things for you to read. Visiting these sites became something akin to checking in on your internet friends. Hell in some cases the people who ran those sites became actual friends who ended up in our wedding party. Hi Kathryn!
When the pivot to video happened you could finally put faces to the names of the people you enjoyed reading.
After Hours and OPCD felt like hanging out with friends. The other videos and sketches they made were like watching them show off their art projects. I was happy for them and happy that they were able to make living doing things that seemed to bring them joy, and brought the world entertainment.
When E.W Scripps abruptly shuttered the office in Santa Monica and let most of the “talent” go it was like they took away our friends without letting us say goodbye.
Okay, weirdo; but why now?
“That’s some pretty deep feelings you have for a comedy website,” You say without understanding that this is still a one way conversation, “Why are you talking about it now, almost a decade later?”
Because they just wiped out their archives. A decade of people’s hard work, people I respected and admired, gone. For some of these guys that archive represented some of their most formative work. For some of them it represented an entire lifetime.
I write in all manner of genres but I can tell you from experience; both on the page and on the stage, writing and performing comedy requires you to be in the right frame of mind. I would often go back and re-read old Cracked articles that I remembered in order to put myself back in that absurd headspace. The kind of headspace where thoughts like “How traumatized was I, as a child, by watching Optimus Prime die on the big screen?” are normal and expected.
Also the answer to that question is: “a lot more than you would think.”
And that’s gone now.
If I’m being honest a lot of the internet that I internet grew up on is gone. They used to say that the internet is forever; but it’s not. Sure I can still go back and revisit their YouTube videos – and I do. But those pen to paper moments, those pre-video prose moments, the internet that a lot of us cut our teeth on? Lost to the trash icon of history.
Which is a special kind of tragedy that I feel not enough people understand.
Travis
we used to laugh
