Shameless Hype #3

December 15th, 2006 Posted in Off-site Articles

Hot on the heels of Shameless Hype #2 is Shameless Hype #3, detailing my involvement with Cracked #3, which hits newsstands officially next week (though it looks like most of the comic book stores are already stocking it). This officially catches me up on my self-congratulatory navel-gazing until Issue #4 in two months. What will I do in the meantime? Rape things, maybe. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll knit a pair of socks.

Click below for the Issue #3 rundown. As before, if you’re not interested, no hard feelings. Actual updates on their way.

Stuff I wrote for this issue

Pg. 1: “Stealing Money From Old People” ad
Pg. 9: “Larry Holmes GrillMaster X-L” fake ad
Our Art Director is extremely talented and a bit of a perfectionist, so I think I shorted something out in her brain when I submitted the script for this and specifically asked that she make the ad look awful. “Like an ad in Reader’s Digest,” I suggested. I think it came out looking awful (i.e. great). I love Larry Holmes’ slow descent into unintelligible nonsense, and the phrase “You can take that to the LAKE” got tossed around the office quite a bit.

Pg. 10: Cracked Photo All-Stars comic; about half of the Rachel Ray quotes
Writing the Stock-Photo All-Stars comics has quickly become one of my favorite parts of the job. My personal favorite doesn’t show up until Issue #4, but there ain’t nothing wrong with a little melon farming jocularity.

The Rachel Ray one was just something getting passed around the office that I contributed to. Mine are #1, #4, #5, #6 and #7.
Pg. 11: “Resolution Reality Check”
Not much to say about this one, other than it’s based more on my actual life than anything else in the magazine. I always tend to get myself roped into Herculean self-improvement plans this time of year, and I invariably backslide around February. As a side note, I invite you to try “No thanks, I don’t need a Scotch. I brought some in a Thermos” sometime. It’s a pain in the ass to carry around the Thermos prop all the time, but well worth it on the off-chance someone asks you if you’d like some Scotch.
Pg. 12: “CelebScoop”
At the time of its writing (two months ago), the idea of an actor promoting racism seemed like a crazy-hilarious idea. Post-Michael Richards, of course, the punchline comes off a bit tame. All the same, I have to admit I’d be at least a little curious to watch a show calling itself the 2006 Racism Awards.
Pg. 13: “Celebrity Intervention: Jon Heder”
I seem to always get lumped with the Celebrity Interventions (see Shameless Hype #2 for more of my inability to avoid eye contact at meetings), but I actually thought this one turned out pretty well. I enjoy the sandwich metaphor, anyway. The bit about picking up runaways on the subway used to be a lot more graphic, perhaps excessively so, but was wisely edited out by reasonable men.
Pg. 23: “Maddox’s The Big Rant” (photoshops)
Maddox had supplied his own photoshops for this, but we hadn’t paid for the images, so I had to redo them from scratch. I had a fun time shopping the lettuce one. Look at him mash that shit in there.
Pg. 30: “So You’ve Regained Consciousness” (writing/photoshops)
A letter from me to the person I’ve just hit with my car, attempting to buy them off with expired Hamburger Helper if they don’t go to the cops.

This marks the last article appearing in Cracked Magazine that has previously appeared on my site. As of Issue #4, I’d officially run out of backlog I could sell off as new stuff (”It’s new-ish“) and was forced to, gasp, come up with original material. So in Issue #4, there’s an original article about St. Patrick’s Day that I wrote, much in the style of “My Vagina, The Prison” or “How To Buy a Mexican Child for 300 Pesos.” I love writing these for the sole reason that the narrator’s always such an oblivious asshole. Coming up with new ways for him to be cruel to people for no reason is the highlight of my daydreams on the subway ride into work.

Photoshopped picture also by me. That I was able to find a picture of a guy actually pumping his fist into the air while driving is no less than an act of providence.
Pgs. 36-37: “Super Bowl Primer”
I believe I had to punch up some of this article, though if you strapped me to a lie detector, I doubt I could recall what I added. (I do distinctly remember adding a “the” in paragraph five, though. Watch out for it!) This was a big “group-write” article that went through many many drafts, and is discussed by one of the authors, Jake Bell, in his blog. (I know, I tend to commission work by comic bloggers a lot. What can I say? I read a lot of comic blogs.)
Pgs. 50-52: “Fastman: Rogues Gallery” (co-written with Peter Lynn)
Credit where it’s due: Pete Lynn actually wrote most of this, from the idea of the rogues gallery to all the backstories; my major contribution was to take his story outline and try to cram it down to three pages of story and add a few throwaway gags into the dialogue here and there.

One of the jokes here might have suffered a bit from being a bit too regional, I later discovered. Growing up in Canada, the “Face Wash” was as famous a torture technique as a Wet Willy or a Titty Twister. Essentially, you sit on someone’s back and scoop snow into their face, and laugh like a cock. Apparently it’s unknown here in the States, as I got nothing but blank stares from the reference. “Why is Fastman washing that guy’s face?”

Pg. 53-57: New Yorker parody
I’m sure I contributed something to this. I had to edit a lot of it, anyway. I know I wrote the fake ads, at least. I was particularly proud of Iain Sinclair’s Ribbed Condoms.

“Great for sex,” assures Sinclair.
Back Cover: “Exposing Yourself at Burger King” ad
That’s two Burger King references in one magazine. Jesus, Pinkerton, get it together.

Pieces I commissioned

Kupperman Komiks, Michael Kupperman
See Shameless Hype #2 for my thoughts on Michael Kupperman.

“New Sex Foods”, Maddox
See Shameless Hype #2 for my thoughts on Maddox.

“Marketing Consultant For The Homeless”, Sir John Hargrave
John Hargrave, who runs the website zug.com, was one of those guys that proves how vastly big a place the web can be; he’d been doing professional-level pranks for years, had gotten linked all over the place, was the subject of interviews and articles, and had a book out, and I’d never heard of him. Only after I’d commissioned a piece from him and met the guy did I actually sit down and read his book, Prank the Monkey. It was incredibly smart and funny. “Holy shit, this guy’s amazing,” I thought. “How could I never have heard of him before?” Because the net’s a big place. And because I’m an antisocial, self-absorbed little troll.

His piece, “Marketing Consultant For The Homeless”, ended up being hysterical. Dude actually got dressed up in a suit and went out badgering homeless people, trying to get them to expand their homeless earning power. He even made a Powerpoint presentation. It was absolutely brilliant.

“Unintentional Comedies,” Michael J. Nelson
See Shameless Hype #2 for my thoughts on Mike Nelson.

“Laugh Audit: Romantic Comedies”, Chris Sims
See Shameless Hype #2 for my thoughts on Chris Sims.

“White Face, Red Nose”, Peter Lynn
I’ll let Pete tell you about this one.

“More Information Than You Require: Interview with John Hodgman,” Max Burbank
Max Burbank is/was one of the writers over at Roger Barr’s I-Mockery.com, and I’d worked with them both a few times while at National Lampoon. Max contacted me about a potential interview he thought he could get with John Hodgman, the frequent Daily Show correspondent, “PC” in the Mac/PC ads and writer of the funny almanac spoof The Areas of My Expertise. I’m always more of a fan of humorists (i.e. writers) than comedians (i.e. stand-up comics) anyway, so it was nice to get an interview with someone who’s more comfortable in front of a word processor than a microphone.

Final Thoughts

Working for a magazine like Cracked starts to feel a bit like a reality TV show after a while—you’re a contestant trying to get as much of the stuff you’ve either written or commissioned into the mag, while competing with other editors who are trying to do the exact same thing. Because comedy’s so subjective, this sort of creative tug-of-war ultimately makes the magazine a lot better, since there’s probably a lot of stuff you find hilarious that I wouldn’t, and vice versa. The more people contributing, the more varied it becomes.

The downside of this, though, is that there are always one or two things that make it into the magazine that I just didn’t think were funny, either because I felt they were too pandering, or too “easy,” or too lowbrow (I’m a bit of a comedy snob). Then they get the biggest response of anything else in the magazine, and I hate humanity just that much more.

Issue #3, for me, had the highest ratio to date of shit I either loved or really liked over stuff that I thought was lacking. Leafing through it now, it’s just really strong. It feels like we started to hit our stride a little, and I liked the fact that we got adventurous with some higher-brow comedy (like our New Yorker parody) that might not be the most popular thing in the issue, but damn it, it was funny and smart. John Hargrave’s “Homeless Marketing Consultant” is probably the funniest infiltration we’ve done yet; I liked being able to get Fastman in for another story (even if he does only have a walk-on appearance in it); Michael Ian Black’s got a hilarious essay in there; Neal Pollack has an extremely cutting spoof column of the New Yorker’s David Remnick. There’s just a lot of stuff in here I enjoy an awful lot.