Never On Sunday

In the semi-mythical “old days,” Mad Magazine was funny. This is not the nostalgia of my childhood talking; I mean Mad was funny before I was born, back when Harvey Kurtzmann was on staff. Things went uniformly downhill from there. When I was a kid, Mad was only occasionally funny, usually when Mort Drucker was illustrating, though Sergio Aragones knows his stuff, too. Don Martin was hit or miss, usually miss. I laughed at more than that, but I was a kid. As Dave Barry observes, the basic message of Mad, namely that “everything is pretty stupid,” is a powerful one for a twelve-year-old. I lost interest somewhere around age fifteen, to a combination of growing maturity and declining humor value. Today Mad pretty thoroughly sucks, its only saving grace being Sergio Aragones’s tiny, one-panel comics that still occasionally appear in the margins.

Cracked magazine was always, if you can imagine such a thing, the low-brow ripoff imitation version of Mad. So it’s wondrous strange to feel the online version of Cracked elicit a grin. Not brilliant, you-gotta-see-this funny, and not yet ready to compete with Jon Steward or the Onion, but at least worth an occasional chuckle. Take their fact list on David Caruso:

1. David Caruso is a serious television actor. At one point, people thought he was a serious film actor. This turned out to be false.
2.His trademark versatility has enabled him to play hard-nosed police officers employed in both New York and Miami—two cities that are literally over one thousand miles apart.
3.It is mostly agreed that the David Caruso method of acting can not be put into words, and is best captured in chart form: Sunglasses on? (Y/N) Yes: remove sunglasses. No: put on sunglasses.

Again, not genius, but still a lot funnier than Mad has been in decades, and doesn’t once descend to dirty words, bodily expulsions, baseless name-calling, or any of the other hallmarks of juvenile humor. The review of “the worst board game of all time” does debase itself, but still managed to make me grin—probably because I’m a board game enthusiast, and therefore likely to laugh at any board game humor.