Cracked.com



Cracked.com, founded in 2005, is a website spin off from the defunct Cracked Magazine, founded in 1958.

Relying largely on (ostensibly) humourous list articles, Cracked has become rather famous on the internet. Its lists, which can be written by anyone, are rooted in fact (usually) and coated in humour, dispensing interesting historical and scientific trivia surrounded by dick jokes (always). It has about a half dozen full-time columnists on payroll, who dish out weekly and biweekly articles on serious subjects from the cultural effects of the Internet, to Choose Your Own Adventure Gonzo-styled articles about visiting the zoo while on an amount of drugs capable of killing most men, to action reporting while getting kidnapped by pirates.

Small time celebrities including Seanbaby and Michael Ian Black have written articles for Cracked, with Seanbaby now part of the column staff. The website plays host to numerous Internet sketch groups, webcomics (such as Subnormality, White Ninja and Daisy Owl), and has its own caption contest. It has taken on an encyclopedic "Cracked Topics" project, where Cracked readers submit articles on a variety of subjects, from Steven Seagal to Punk Rock (including one about TV Tropes).

For tropes related to the original mag, see Cracked.

For a rundown of who's who on the current column writers:


 * Jack O'Brien (Editor-in-Chief) (2005-)
 * David Wong (Senior Editor, also the author of John Dies at the End) (2007-)
 * Robert Brockway (2007-)
 * Chris Bucholz (2006-)
 * Cody Johnston (2009-)
 * Wayne "Gladstone" Gladstone (2006-)
 * Soren Bowie (2009-)
 * Dan O'Brien (or DOB) (2007-)
 * Sean "Seanbaby" Riley (2009-)
 * Michael Swaim (Though his current priority is videos.) (2006-)
 * Christina Hsu (H.) (2009-)
 * John Cheese (2008-)
 * Luke McKinney (2007-)
 * Adam Brown, a frequent poster promoted to columnist. (2007-)
 * Brendan McGinley, a person recently added to be a columnist.( 2011-)

With frequent non-columnist posters:


 * Kristi Harrison (also editor)(2007-)

Formerly:


 * Ross Wolinsky (2006-2008)
 * Ian Fortey (2007-2010)

They also have video content. The videos range from cultural to just random topics:


 * Cracked TV (now Does Not Compute) hosted by Michael Swaim, whose content comes primarily from lists compiled by the Cracked forums.
 * Cody Johnston produces somewhat esoteric standalone videos.
 * Agents of Cracked, Cracked's main comedy web-miniseries starring Michael Swaim and Daniel O'Brien.
 * After Hours, set in a diner where Soren Bowie, DOB, Swaim and Katie Willert discuss pop culture.
 * Other regular contributors include BriTaNick, Black 20, and Those Aren't Muskets.

On top of the regular columnists, Cracked accepts articles from anybody who wants to write one: all you have to do is create a forum account and then post in this thread to get access to a forum where you can pitch your own potential articles. As such, some of their articles are written by denizens of This Very Wiki.

If you're going to add tropes that have to do with Agents of Cracked please put them here.

Reading and/or general association with Cracked.com will also make you irresistibly sexually attractive.[citation needed]

A
""Let's face it, cities can be terrifying. They are, after all, filled with people like us. The modern metropolis is a teeming hive of strung-out dope heads, rapists, home invaders and fine regional cuisine.""
 * Accidental Hero: 10 Photos Capturing Moments of Spontaneous Badassery.
 * Action Girl: One of 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games is that "every sexy girl is a ruthless killer."
 * Action Pet: This article about 5 soldier dogs.
 * Action Survivor: One of The 5 Most Badass Ways People Escaped from Slavery is how Eliza Harris carried several children across a river while jumping from one moving ice platform to another as if it were a Mario game. This is the true story Uncle Tom's Cabin was based on.
 * Added Alliterative Appeal: The entries in 5 Superpowers We All Had as Babies (According to Science)
 * The Ageless: 6 Unassuming Animals That Are Secretly Immortal lists animal species that don't die of old age, such as lobsters and turtles.
 * AI Is a Crapshoot: In 39 Astounding Celebrity (And One Cracked) Reboot, Clippy attempts a Hostile Show Takeover, which ultimately culminates in
 * The Alcoholic: John Cheese is a recovering alcoholic. More than one article has been written about how much of a struggle it's been.
 * Aliens Speaking English: Called The 5 Stupidest Way Movies Deal with Foreign Languages.
 * All Just a Dream: The article "Why 'Saved by the Bell' is All a Dream: A Conspiracy Theory" explains why Saved by the Bell has to be an escapist dream of a character in Good Morning, Miss Bliss (the pilot that was retooled into SBTB), using clues from the Expository Theme Tune.
 * Alternative Character Interpretation: In-universe (for lack of a better term). One article has an alternate interpretation of Glinda the Good Witch.
 * 9 Famous Movie Villains Who Were Right All Along.
 * 6 Beloved Characters That Had Undiagnosed Mental Illnesses.
 * 6 Insane (But Convincing) Theories on Children's Pop Culture.
 * 6 Classic Kids Shows Secretly Set in Nightmarish Universes.
 * What Seanbaby did to old Popsicle Pete comics, reimagining him as a harbinger of death and despair.
 * NONE OF YOU ARE SAFE.
 * Ambiguous Disorder: Spoofed in Why Batman Is Secretly Terrible for Gotham.
 * And I Must Scream: Do not trifle with the Adventure Master.
 * Anti-Humor: In 7 Animals That Are Evolving Right Before Our Eyes
 * Q: What did the elephant say to the poacher?
 * A: Dear God in heaven, please don't kill me for my ivory.
 * Sorry about that. Sometimes we get "joke" mixed up with "tragic imagined dialogue that could be happening at this very second if elephants had the power of speech."
 * Apocalyptic Log: A common format.
 * 5 Internet Prescribed 'Cleanses' That Made Me Immortal is a good example.
 * Appropriated Appellation: 5 Famous Symbols that Were Created to Be Horrible Insults explains how the gay-pride pink triangle came from the Nazis, the donkey came from political cartoons dissing President Andrew Jackson, and "Yankee" came from a song written by a British army physician claiming that the rebels were aspiring to a social class they did not deserve.
 * Archive Binge: In "4 Reasons 'Hemlock Grove' Is Television's Shitty Future", J. F. Sargent accuses Netflix and other Archive Binge outlets of encouraging TV writers to drop substance in favor of shallow entertainment with lame cliffhanger gags to addict viewers into watching one more episode. And there's no threat of mid-season cancellation to keep showrunners honest. Hemlock Grove is guilty.
 * The Aristocrats: The #3 plot twist cut from a Disney animated movie.
 * So what do you call your act?
 * The Aristocats!
 * Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Sometimes, the #1 spot of a list is relatively less extreme than the ones before it.
 * Also, the unwritten law seems to be to reserve the last spot for the second (or somewhere close) most triumphant example as an 'appetizer'. So if it's a list of 17 worst haircuts in the Ottoman Empire, it would be like; 2-17-16- ... -4-3-1.
 * From "5 Popular Safety Measures That Don't Make You Any Safer":

""We tend to find Spider-Man easier to identify with than other superheroes. He's not an alien, like Superman, or the son of a major Norse god, like Thor, or a Canadian, like Wolverine.""
 * From "6 Famous Movies with Mind-Blowing Hidden Meanings":

"We are not blaming bad teachers for Adolf Hitler, Timothy McVeigh, and Spencer Pratt"
 * From "6 Famous Movie Wisemen Who Were Totally Full of Shit"

"We love the way the writer crammed in every scary word they could think of: rape, war, cancer, emphysema, respiratory distress, anemia, constipation, irritability, blindness, Canada."
 * From 7 Retarded Food Myths the Internet Thinks Are True:

"We tend to think of ourselves as the smartest animals on Earth. After all, we've built such technological wonders such as the internet, the internal combustion engine, and sneakers that light up when you take a step"
 * From 6 Animals with Better Memories than You

"[The rebels] were trapped, outnumbered, ill-equipped, poorly trained, freezing and starving, and it was raining."
 * From 6 Real Historic Battles Decided by Divine Intervention:

""Where do you go when your name is already Staff Sgt. Max fucking Fightmaster? Oh, wait, there you go. Just make "Fucking" an official part of the name. We think it's almost impossible to say the name without it anyway.""
 * "8 Mind-Blowing Realities of Our Future Full of Old People" describes a likely reaction to a proposed solution to the coming farm labor shortage.
 * Oh hey, let's import unwhites to do our labor! Why don't we bring back slavery and dial-up Internet service while we're at it?
 * The lead of 5 Heartwarming Accomplishments by Hardened Prison Inmates claims that humans are "capable of some pretty terrible stuff, like robbery and murder and Bono."
 * Attention Deficit Ooh Shiny: #6 on If Everything Got An Adorable Mascot is Addie the ADHD tornado. "Let us help you learn to cope with... Ohh!!! Shiny!!!"
 * Audience Surrogate: "Make Them Look and Sound Like the Audience, Against All Logic" is #4 of 6 Tricks Movies Use to Make Sure You Root for the Right Guy.
 * Author Appeal: 6 Artists Whose Weird Fetishes Defined Pop Culture
 * Authority Equals Asskicking: The 5 Most Badass Presidents of All Time. Counts as a We All Live in America too.
 * Automaton Horses: Photoplasty advertises a whistle to summon one in Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games.
 * Autopsy Snack Time: #4 of 4 Bizarrely Specific Rules That Exist in Movie Universes mentions cases in Gone in Sixty Seconds, Scrubs, and others where it appears a coroner can't enjoy his sandwich without a corpse in the room. It even links to the page on That Other Trope Wiki.
 * Awesome but Impractical:
 * The ball tank, #2 of 6 Utterly Insane Innovations History Was SURE Were Coming and #2 of 7 WTF Military Weapons You Won't Believe They Actually Built.
 * The 11 Most Retarded Fictional Weapons, including the Klingon bat'leth.
 * Awesome McCoolname: Staff Sgt Max Fightmaster.


 * Testosticor Fantastiballs.

B
""Perhaps you could pretend the people out in the street begging for food are orcs!""
 * Badass: Several lists commit themselves to talking about the most badass things found in that subject. Most notably, The 5 Most Badass Presidents of All-Time.
 * Jack O'Brien, the "boss guy" of Cracked. He's possibly an insanely hardened criminal badass who likes to make time for "Jack's Rock Hour". The fact that he's the superior to the columnists say something about him.
 * Badass Grandpa: 6 Old People Who Could Kick Your Ass
 * Badass Mustache: If the subject of one of their articles has awesome facial hair, they will point it out.
 * Badass Princess: ...who are too badass for Disney movies.
 * Bad Boss: These six.
 * Bag of Holding: Photoplasty advertises jeans with such a pocket in Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games.
 * Bait and Switch Comment: This is a not uncommon format for article titles, such as "10 Awesome Ads (For Traumatizing Children)".
 * Batman. Seriously. He's the god-damn Patron Saint of this site. If anything can have a Batman reference, it will.
 * Be the Ball: The operation of the Morph Ball in Metroid is the #27 Science Lesson As Taught by Famous Video Games.
 * The Beast Master: In Photoplasty contest 28 Inspirational Image Memes (Revised for Honesty), #5 is "If at first you don't succeed, command an army of birds."
 * The Bechdel Test: Luke McKinney points out in The 4 Best Moments in the Worst Movies Ever Made that the movie based on the video game Dead or Alive "physically beats the shit out of the Bechdel test" "within the first 10 minutes".
 * Behind the Black: In Swaim's normal series you never see his legs, and he once claimed to not have any.
 * Berserk Button: Seanbaby has a HUGE one in the "romance" guides of one Gregory JP Godek. Every article he even tangentially features in devolves into Seanbaby cursing his birth.
 * Cody and Two and A Half Men. If the show comes up at any point in one of his articles, expect it to devolve into pure bile.
 * Better by a Different Name:
 * Discussed in #4 of 6 Common Movie Arguments That Are Always Wrong.
 * Yet it goes on to explain why Home Alone and Die Hard are the same movie.
 * Better Than Canon: Invoked: 6 insane fan theories that actually make great movies better.
 * 5 Movie Fan Theories That Make More Sense Than the Movie.
 * The Big Guy: Compared to the other columnists, Seanbaby is this physically, Robert Brockway is this in personality.
 * Also, Michael Swaim. He doesn't look that big until he's placed next to his coworkers in video sketches, when it becomes readily apparent that he is a full head taller (or more) than everyone else.
 * Bilingual Bonus: Cezary Jan Strusiewicz's 5 Movie Jokes You Missed If You Only Speak English mentions Mulan's boy name being Cantonese slang for "eye candy", a Morse coded Jerry Maguire reference in Peter Jackson's King Kong, and restaurant names in films like L.A. Story, From Paris with Love, and Anchorman. And it's more than movies: it mentions references to Urusei Yatsura and Dirty Pair in Star Trek: The Next Generation, as well as a Valyrian translation of insults from Monty Python and the Holy Grail appearing in Game of Thrones.
 * Bilingual Dialogue: Called The 5th Stupidest Way Movies Deal with Foreign Languages.
 * Black Comedy: 7 Great Products for Telling the World You're a Rich Dick.


 * Black Comedy Rape
 * Blatant Lies: "America's Only Humor & Video Site, Since 1958". This date refers to Cracked's beginning as a magazine rivaling Mad in 1958.
 * By 2013, the "Since 1958" had disappeared from the front page. But stories still refer to it occasionally, such as "6 Ridiculous Myths You Believe About Stuff You Use Every Day" which states that locking refrigerators were banned in the United States around the time Cracked first appeared on newsstands.
 * Block Puzzle: The reason "interior design" is #3 on 5 Real Skills Video Games Have Secretly Been Teaching Us. Apparently, all that moving blocks around is great training for knowing just how to arrange furniture to make it easy to get around.
 * You'd think he'd mention the Light and Mirrors Puzzle as well. I know I'd hire a Deflektor veteran to set up the lamps and mirrors in my study so the light was just right.
 * B-Movie: B-Movie Posters for Classic Films.
 * Biting the Hand Humor: "It's the stupidest idea for someone to sink money into ever since somebody decided to start a website based only on the name recognition of a magazine that no longer existed."
 * Bleep, Dammit!: The titles of articles about meteors and video game endings jarringly grawlix out a certain word starting with F that article bodies use uncensored all the time. Yet an article about so-called experts gets away with an S-bomb in the title.
 * Blind Weaponmaster: One of Jorden Weir's 5 People Whose Major Disabilities Only Made Them Stronger is a blind sharpshooter.
 * Body Horror: This Photoplasty contest.
 * Bottomless Bladder: Photoplasty advertises undergarments and supplements that make this possible in "Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games": #20 and #4.
 * Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: Some writers love constructions like this.
 * Animals that could take over the world if they wanted to
 * "So when a camera, or a phone, or a camera phone doesn't heed our commands..."
 * In 5 Terrible Things We Only Know Because of the Internet, Felix Clay describes the Internet as "full of hilarious gifs and cats and gifs of cats."
 * Cities that get a lot of tourism are characterized using this in 5 Stupid Travel Myths Everyone Believes:
 * By simply walking around, you'll ... see the way they drive (manically), the way they urinate in the street (freely), and the way they urinate while they drive (frothily).
 * Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: This article. "In severe cases, the condition results in difficulty breathing, problems swallowing, muscle ruptures and fucking broken bones."
 * And zig-zagged in this article about luxury junk food: "Ramen is a bowl of noodles, broth, spices and destitution that you'll find in college dorms and poverty-stricken homes across the U.S. "
 * And the final entry in this article about public transportation about bad behavior on public transport is.
 * 8 Mind-Blowing Realities of Our Future Full of Old People" compares making a home safe for senior citizens to childproofing.
 * Plugs have to be covered, gates erected, breakables moved, cabinets locked, knives dulled, bullets replaced with blanks, etc.
 * Breakable Weapons: Photoplasty advertises a product that dulls weapons in Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games.
 * Brick Joke: A while back, Daniel O'Brien wrote this article, about what to do when alone in a room with your doppelganger. In Agents of Cracked season 2 episode 3, he finds himself in that exact situation, and the doppelganger brings up the article.
 * While the article itself is not brought up, the meet-your-doppelganger scenario showed up in Agents of Cracked season 1 episode 7 "Curse of the Idol".
 * Which means that DOB has both
 * Brown Note: According to 5 Bizarre Animal Chain Reactions Our Daily Lives Are Causing, humans' ships' sonar gives squid fatal seizures.
 * Buddy Cop Show Where They Fight Crime
 * Why Crimes Would Never Get Solved At A TV Police Station
 * Called an easy way to involve a Token Minority in the #1 Weirdest Lesson '80s Movies Really Wanted to Teach Us.
 * Bungled Suicide: 6 Insane Disney Comics You Won't Believe Are Real shows some 1930 Mickey strips where breaking up with Minnie causes him to attempt suicide several ways but fail each time.
 * Burn the Witch: Being burned is Mary Poppins's nightmare according to a Photoplasty: 24 Nightmares of Famous Fictional Characters
 * But He Sounds Handsome: In "This Is Why You Don't Steal From Cracked", DOB doesn't know WHO retaliated against the plagiarist, but is probably someone handsome and witty and with just a hint of Spider-Man-like qualities.
 * But It Really Happened!: Happens in almost every article. Especially in the "Images You Won't Believe Aren't Photoshopped" articles.
 * Butch Lesbian: Photoplasty Famous Images, As Seen From a Different Angle has the linked-Venus lesbianism symbol on Rosie the Riveter's bicep.

C

 * Canada, Eh?: Chris Bucholz has a "babbling, near-unintelligible Canadian accent" and apparently, because of the sound of it, birds won't land when he's nearby.
 * Caption Contest: The daily Craption Contest, where users once submitted captions for a silly picture and got votes on which one is the funniest.
 * Catch Phrase: "Oh shit, we went there", for when the article is about to slam a beloved character, such as Batman or Obi-wan.
 * Chain of Deals: Steven Ortiz received a used cell phone as a gift, used Craigslist to trade it for other things, and ended up with a 2000 Porsche, according to The 6 Most Amazing Things Ever Traded For Pointless Crap.
 * Chainmail Bikini
 * One of the "5 Prejudices That Video Games Can't Seem to Get Over".
 * One of 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games is that "the less it covers, the more it protects."
 * Changing Clothes Is a Free Action: In real life it isn't, according to 5 Video Game Strategies that Are Way Less Useful in Reality.
 * Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: What ever happened to columnist Ross Wolinsky?
 * City in a Bottle: An article lists 6 isolated groups who had no idea that civilization existed.
 * Clark Kenting: The 9 Stupidest Superhero Secret Identities. The Trope Namer is #1.
 * Classic Cheat Code: Doom "idspispopd" referenced in a Photoplasty: Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games
 * Cliché Storm: E. Reid Ross wrote in 4 Reasons the New Christian Mingle Movie Will Be Hilarious that the trailer of the film Christian Mingle "May Have Set the All-Time Record for Cliches".
 * Clothes Make the Superman: One of 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games uses Mario's suits to make the point that "there is no problem that a change of wardrobe won't solve."
 * Color-Coded Armies: One of 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games is that "somebody being the wrong color is a perfectly okay reason to attack them."
 * Come for the X, Stay for the Y: In-universe. 5 Words You Use Every Day With Shockingly Dark Backstories links the word "fornication" to prostitutes finding clients in bakeries. It gives as an example the novel Satyricon by Gaius Petronius, which "talks about bakers tricking clients into coming for the bread and staying 'thither for the base gratification of wantonness.'"
 * Comically Missing the Point: One article bashes Boastful Raps for being unrealistic.
 * You can expect the idiots in the comments section to do this quite a bit- the people who genuinely took the "Four Steps to Staying Relevant as a Bully" article as serious advice are a notable example.
 * Commie Nazis: An alliance between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia was narrowly averted according to "5 Insane 'What If' Scenarios That Almost Changed Everything".
 * Con Lang: 5 Complex Languages Invented by One (Crazy) Person by Chris Bucholz describes Quenya, Esperanto, Lojban, and Klingon, as well as the still-undeciphered Voynich manuscript.
 * Concealment Equals Cover: One of 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games is that "bullets can't pass through wood or cars."
 * Continuity Nod: If a writer thinks something is particularly funny, they'll probably throw it in to whatever situation they feel is remotely appropriate. See this article where Seanbaby takes a potshot at Bullet Ball, the inventor of which you may recall being number one on Seanbaby's list of the greatest failures in the history of talent shows ever.
 * Convection, Schmonvection: Discussed in the final entry of 6 Deadly Injuries You Think You'd Survive (Thanks to Movies).
 * Covered Up: One of 6 Famous Songs Written by the Last Person You'd Expect is "Red Red Wine", written and originally recorded by Neil Diamond and popularized by UB40's cover.
 * Cowboy Bebop at His Computer: Many articles are plagued by this trope. See Dan Browned entry below.
 * Crazy Cat Lady:
 * Parodied by Christina H., whose column is called "Let Me Tell You About My Cats."
 * Pets are #5 of the 6 Things You Didn't Know You Could Get Addicted To, and this article links it to Toxoplasma gondii parasites.
 * Photoplasty Famous Images, As Seen From a Different Angle shows a dozen cats on the side of the room that we don't see in James McNeill Whistler's famous portrait of his mother.
 * Creator Breakdown: Several of John Cheese's articles, particularly his recent ones, have been informed by his less-than-happy childhood and personal issues stemming from this.
 * DOB's gotten in on this trope, too, on occasion, though not nearly to the extent Cheese has.
 * Critical Encumbrance Failure: A human being able to lift 300 kg as if it were nothing but not 301 kg is the #12 Science Lesson As Taught by Famous Video Games.
 * The CSI Effect:
 * Explained as arising from the misconception that government agencies are staffed by geniuses, according to "5 Things TV Writers Apparently Believe About Smart People".
 * Chris Bucholz calls CSI's effect on jury instructions one of 5 TV Moments That Caused Bizarre Real-World Consequences. The article also mentions criminals' increased care in cleaning up crime scenes, as well as increased enrollment in university forensics courses that may cause a flood of unemployed graduates.

D
"When Buddy found out his bassist Waylon Jennings wasn't going to be on the plane, he said to him: "Well, I hope your ol' bus freezes up." Jennings ominously replied: "Well, I hope your ol' plane crashes." A clap of thunder was heard in the background."
 * Dan Browned: Often times their articles, even if they're cited, end up being either gross misrepresentations of the facts or even flat-out lies. A particularly Egregious example is in their article "If Oscar Speeches Told the Truth" where they claim the screenplay to Good Will Hunting wasn't really written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and the citation they link to directly contradicts their entire point.
 * Dancing Bear: Felix Clay in 6 Horror Mashups Just Crazy Enough to Be Awesome calls The Human Centipede a "Shlock shock horror movie that was made solely for the sensationalism of saying it was actually made [...] The novelty of this movie ended with the idea of it."
 * Dangerous Workplace: Apparently the Cracked headquarters is a hellish place run by deranged lunatics lead by a rockstar-like figure with No OSHA Compliance whatsoever where writers prefer dangerous reporting missions than to writing in a wooden cage while DOB is out with a working lighter.
 * In Agents of Cracked, it's a somewhat deranged workplace run by a mysterious badass, whose requirements for employment involve killing a man, and terrorists and Michael are allowed to roam.
 * Darker and Edgier:
 * "3 Movies They Don't Make Anymore (But Really Should)" decries the trend of "taking popular, existing properties and bringing out the darkest and grittiest aspects they can find" seen in Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, among other movies.
 * In "4 Bizarrely Specific Rules Fairy Tale Adaptations All Follow", David Christopher Bell claims that recent film adaptations of fairy tales invoke this to invert Disneyfication.
 * David Versus Goliath (no, not Wong): Cracked cites a few cases.
 * The 7 Most Badass Man vs. Beast Showdowns includes a man driving a bear by kicking in the face and a women driving a way hippo by hitting in the head with a stick.
 * The 6 Most Mismatched Battles Ever Won by Underdogs describes victories by severely outnumbered forces in Persia, the Ottomans, Korea, Hungary, and the Mongols.
 * Dawson Casting: Diana Cook doesn't like this trope. She calls out Glee in #4 and Oliver Stone's Alexander in #2 of "5 Unwritten Rules Hollywood Needs to Stop Following".
 * Death by Sex: The 6 Most Bizarre Ways to Lose Popular Video Games describes an odd Nonstandard Game Over in Mass Effect 2.
 * Death World: Having grown tired of jokes about Australia, Cracked has now gone on to imply we live in a Death universe.
 * Deceptively-Human Robots: Michael Swaim consistently refers to himself as "your Host Droid".
 * Decon Recon Switch: 3 Reasons It's So Hard to Make Superman Interesting spends a page deconstructing the boring Invincible Hero and then another reconstructing a hero faced with the Sadistic Choice of whom to save at any given moment.
 * Deconstructor Fleet: Frequently, the themes for the photoshop contests amount to "Show what X would be like in the real world."
 * Department of Redundancy Department : "Now it's time to check in on the robot body I'm building to put Clippy's mind into, in a segment I like to call 'Checking in on the robot body I'm building to put Clippy's mind into.'"
 * Description Cut: Quite common. Sometimes an entry will end with something along the lines of 'The only thing crazier than that would be if x happened.' with the next entry being x.
 * Did Not Do the Research: Because much of the content is done by freelance contributors, the lists tend to vary between this and Shown Their Work. Some of the apparent research failure can be chalked up to Rule of Funny.
 * This writer is under the impression comic books stopped updating their villains since the silver age. Some of those characters have been updated to the point where the fans think that they are some of the better villains like The Riddler and The Penguin.
 * In this article, the writer is under the impression that Superhero Movie was made by Seltzer and Friedberg. It wasn't. It was made by Zucker, Abrams, and Zucker. He also mistakenly claims that a scene from Epic Movie is in it, although there is an editor's note recognizing this.
 * In this article, the writer blames Guy Fawkes of being a "fighter for Spain and the Catholic Church" and "trying to install an evil theocracy in place of the slightly more egalitarian Protestant revolution". In truth, the gunpowder plot was in part motivated by Spain washing its hands off of the situation, which is the opposite of what the article says. This is generally a one-sided account of a decidedly Grey and Gray Morality situation- for one thing, Catholics were persecuted in this "egalitarian" England.
 * Jacopo Della Quercia and Rohan Ramakrishnan are usually the biggest offenders at times.
 * This article seems to be under the impression that the face-huggers in the Aliens series literally impregnates people, which is just Memetic Mutation, and that everything on Pandora is impossible simply on the basis that its wildlife is similar to Earth's.
 * In the making of this article, Fletcher W. seems to have neglected to do any research into Pokémon Black and White beyond the fact that the creator based Unova off of New York. He believes that Route 4 is Ground Zero and was somehow caused by Team Plasma and Kyurem, the latter of which resides in a cave about ten routes away. He also says that it's 9'11" instead of 9'10".
 * The writers regularly call spiders "insects" and commit similar mixups.
 * This article confuses the Paralympics with the Special Olympics.
 * A recent one claimed that a solar probe that could stand up to 2600 degrees Fahrenheit (1430 C) would laugh in the face of the molten metal of Terminator 2, except that melting iron takes at least 2790 F (1530 C). Melting carbon (the other part of steel) is even higher (6500F/3600C)
 * Apparently one of the Cracked writers thinks the Stonewall Riots were caused specifically because of Judy Garland's death upsetting gay people.
 * This one calls Peter the Great a wimp because he didn't have a beard and was skinny. He was also almost seven feet tall and incredibly strong.
 * Robert Evans using Dan Savage as a source to analyze bisexual behaviour. Dan Savage may be a respected advisor on sex, but he is also infamous for being extremely prejudiced on this particular subject.
 * While it still is only a Cracked Topic article this article's first example of an unfunny C&H comic is one where the creators were obviously mocking each other with intentional unfunniness.
 * A recent hilarious example happened with The 6 Greatest Video Games We'll Never Get to Play. Entry #6 discusses a "zombie game done right", where the game focuses on the "apocalypse" aspects of a zombie apocalypse. What makes it hilarious is that the article came out just as the gaming press was spotlighting a new mod for the detailed combat simulator Arma II caled Day Z...
 * Digital Piracy Is Evil: 5 Insane File Sharing Panics From Before The Internet
 * Disability Superpower:
 * Someone with no legs would make a better fighter pilot because G forces wouldn't drain blood to the legs, according to the article 5 People Who Turned Awful Disabilities Into Superpowers.
 * One of Jorden Weir's 5 People Whose Major Disabilities Only Made Them Stronger is a mixed martial artist missing half of one forearm, making him a lot harder to grab.
 * Discredited Trope: Several articles discuss tropes deemed discredited. These include 6 Sci-Fi Movie Conventions (That Need to Die) and 5 Overused Twist Endings It's Time For Movies to Retire.
 * Disproportionate Retribution: Clippy taunts Brockway about his grammar and writing skills. In return, Brockway murders his wife, mentally destroys his children, mocks Clippy's failed suicide attempt following that, and finally summons Cthulhu to drag Clippy's bleeding body away for infinite torment. Harsh, yet hilarious.
 * And here, 7 Obnoxious Behaviours That Should Be Punishable By Death.
 * Seen again in this article.
 * Distracted by the Sexy: Men make more short-term-oriented decisions after exposure to sexual stimuli, as explained in #3 of 5 Unrealistic Movie Cliches That Are Scientifically Accurate.
 * Does This Remind You of Anything?: DOB considers the hair-braid USB in Avatar to be basically rape.
 * Dolled-Up Installment: "5 Little-Known Sequels That Ruined Iconic Stories" expains that Charles Webb admitted that his novel Home School, the sequel to The Graduate, had the old characters shoehorned into a new story.
 * Double Standard: "5 Prejudices That Video Games Can't Seem to Get Over" claims that video games allow lesbian subtext but no male gay subtext.
 * Dramatic Thunder: Mentioned in 5 World Changing Decisions (Made for Ridiculous Reasons, regarding the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly


 * Dream Apocalypse: In an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, via 5 Horrifying Implications of the 'Star Trek' Universe, Picard is playing holodeck when one of the characters asks him: "When you're gone, will this world still exist? Will my wife and kids still be waiting for me at home?"
 * Duet Bonding: #2 of 5 Unrealistic Movie Cliches That Are Scientifically Accurate points out a study finding that people singing together end up synchronizing their brainwaves.
 * Dumpster Dive: It's a way of life in Manshiyat Naser, whose residents live off Cairo's garbage, making it one of The 6 Weirdest Cities People Actually Live In.
 * The Dung Ages: Debunked in "6 Ridiculous Myths About the Middle Ages Everyone Believes" and "5 Ridiculous Myths You Probably Believe About the Dark Ages".

E
"David Wong: [W]e turned the ["How I Got My Camera" viral video] over to the 30-man Cracked.com video analysis team, who spent six months processing every pixel of the original upload. After enhancing the image to a level of clarity more than 6,000 times that of the original, they reported that there was a prominent watermark for a site called wittkopp.net in the upper right."
 * Ear Worm: Discussed in The 6 Weirdest Cities People Actually Live In, after a bit about a city whose residents live off the capital's garbage: "Great, now we have the Sanford and Son theme stuck in our heads."
 * Earn Your Happy Ending: After churning out article after depressing biographical article, John Cheese gives us this.
 * Which then eventually leads into this. Awwwwwww.
 * Eldritch Abomination: Popsicle Pete.
 * He's only the herald. And he walks among us already.
 * Spiders.
 * Gustave the Giant Crocodile. Robert Evans describes him as "a living, breathing, scream-eating dinosaur that is so sick of his own immortality that he passes the time by destroying life whenever he sees it."
 * Elemental Embodiment: The #8 Science Lesson As Taught by Famous Video Games represents them as hot chicks.
 * The End of the World as We Know It: Several articles list things that can end the world, things that can end the world when you don't expect it, and things that can end the world that already happened.
 * Enforced Method Acting: 5 Amazing Performances From Actors Who Weren't Acting and 12 Classic Movie Moments Made Possible by Abuse and Murder
 * Enhance Button: Parodied in 7 Viral Videos You Didn't Know Were Staged (and How They Did It):
 * Enhance Button: Parodied in 7 Viral Videos You Didn't Know Were Staged (and How They Did It):


 * Enhanced Remake: The #3 Science Lesson As Taught by Famous Video Games is that "new 16-bit microscopes may prove existence of sub-pixel particles".
 * Even Evil Has Standards: "Here at Cracked, one of our specialties is "not making jokes about the rape of Nanking"".
 * 7 Ruthless Criminals Who Turned Good When Nobody Was Looking
 * Even the Guys Want Him: Ever since Soren Bowie's headshot was posted in this article, most of the comment threads in his recent columns have consisted of both male and female readers fawning over him.
 * Every Device Is a Swiss Army Knife: Mentioned by name in #4 of 6 Sci-Fi Movie Conventions (That Need to Die).
 * Everything Trying to Kill You: Lots of lists involve various animals/places and how they can kill/maim/burn/harm you without even trying. Australia shows up a lot on these lists, apparently you need to kill five species of poisonous spider just to get to the bathroom.
 * Also Brockway's book, Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody: The Terrifyingly Real Ways the World Wants You Dead.
 * Everything's Better with Monkeys:
 * The 7 Best Kinds of Monkeys.
 * M. Asher Cantrell's The 10 Biggest Password Mistakes People Make cites a study claiming that half a percent of English-speaking Internet users have "monkey" as a password on an online account and suggests it may be related to the word's status as an Inherently Funny Word.
 * Everything's Worse with Bears: The final entry in 5 True War Stories That Put Every Action Movie to Shame. We'll just let it speak for itself.
 * Evil Hand: Somatoparaphrenia, or the delusion that someone's limb is not his own, is discussed in The 6 Most Mind-Blowing Ways Your Brain Can Malfunction. It results from damage to the homunculus, the part of the brain that tracks where each body part is.
 * Experimented in College: One of the myths in 5 Ridiculous Sex Myths Everyone Believes.
 * Exactly What It Says on the Tin:
 * In 6 Ridiculous Tumblrs That Yahoo Just Paid $1 Billion For, Alex Hanton claims that Bruce Springsteen's Crotch and many other Tumblr blogs "stand up for truth in advertising. You click on this, you know exactly what you're getting."
 * Readers retitle several movies in this manner in If Movie Titles Were Honest.

F

 * Fake Longevity: Mark Hill calls padding the #2 Reason Video Games Have Terrible Stories.
 * Fake Nationality: Resulting accent dissonance called The Single Stupidest Way Movies Deal with Foreign Languages.
 * Famous, Famous, Fictional: This is #5 of 6 Sci-Fi Movie Conventions (That Need to Die), the example being "Newton, Einstein, Sulak".
 * Fantastic Racism:
 * An article 6 Horrifying Implications of Awesome Fantasy Movie Universes mentions how Middle-earth is segregated in the time of The Lord of the Rings: "There are no humans or elves living in the Shire, and if a hobbit is going to live in Rivendell, he'd better be a big goddamned deal."
 * J.F. Sargent calls the very existence of Fantasy Counterpart Cultures one of the "5 Prejudices That Video Games Can't Seem to Get Over".
 * Fastball Special: One of 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games is that "your unborn children make awesome weapons." The example given is from Yoshi's Island.
 * Fauxtivational Poster: Photoplasty contest 28 Inspirational Image Memes (Revised for Honesty) parodies Successories and other inspirational glurge posters.
 * Fetish Fuel: #3 of 6 New Kinds of Anxiety the Internet Gave Us is "The Confusion/Disgust/Arousal of Stumbling Upon Someone Else's Sexual Fetish".
 * Fetish Retardant: In-universe (lacking a better term). The 8 Most Misguided Attempts at 'Sexy' Videos on YouTube
 * Fifteen Minutes of Fame: #1 of 6 New Kinds of Anxiety the Internet Gave Us is "The Shock of Instant, Unintentional Fame".
 * Filler: The major columnists for the site almost never update on Saturday, so the site tends to link to images from older Photoshop contests to pad out the front page.
 * Which some readers still bitch about like it's a new thing.
 * Final Death: Parodied in a Photoplasty. Inability to start a new game after having lost all lives is the #22 terrible idea that would have ruined Super Mario Bros.
 * Flame War: #2 of 6 New Kinds of Anxiety the Internet Gave Us is "The Dread of Stumbling into a Hornet's Nest".
 * Flipping the Bird: Some pictures show people doing that a lot in top-number lists.
 * Flashmob: In "College of DuPage Flash Mob Dance and Pep Rally", one of 5 Videos That Will Brighten Your Day, a half dozen people perform rehearsed dance moves, and then someone outside the group spontaneously joins in the dance fever. "Oh, life is a musical now? OK, I'd better adapt!"
 * Follow the Money: Levitating coins are explained as lighter-than-air currency in the #7 Science Lesson As Taught by Famous Video Games.
 * Foreign Queasine: The 6 Most Terrifying Foods in the World.
 * For Science!: 6 Most Badass Stunts Pulled In The Name Of Science
 * Freudian Slip: From this video: "I've been your boobs, Michael Boobs. Allow me to boobs you tits".
 * Fridge Logic: Invoked in quite a few articles which consist of thinking about the surprisingly gruesome implications of popular TV shows and movies.
 * Fun Size: Calling tiny, trick-or-treat size candy bars "fun size", or calling any sort of eating "fun" for that matter, is one of The 5 Stupidest Lies Advertisers Expect You to Believe. It compares the practice to Little People demanding to be called "fun size".
 * Fun with Acronyms: Michael Swaim starts off every episode of Cracked TV with Some Weird Acronym Instead of a Monologue. His official blog on the site is called "Slander Without Any Inherent Meaning".
 * Also Spelling Wuz Aever a Iuge Mriority.
 * And Swaim (s)Wimulates A (human) IMotion.
 * For Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness value, he had Somnambulists Wainscot Antidisestablishmentarianismntidisestablishmentarianistically Irrespective of Malapropisms.
 * Stutter. Wow. Awkward! I am so sorry. Moving on.
 * Gary Busey's Explorations of Science has a bunch:
 * "[This textbook] might contradict what your eyeballs tell you, but that means it's working. EYEBALLS stands for Events You Experience by Alien Laser LieRay Satellites."
 * "If everyone wasn't special, no one would be. Which is why SPECIAL stands for Sunny Pals Extremely Chromosomed and Immune to Apes and Lightning."
 * Gary Busey even manages to plan an acronym around his own death: "LEARNING stands for Leading Excitement! Argh! Reality! No! I-- No! GAAAAHH!!!!"
 * Furry Confusion: 6 Insane Disney Comics You Won't Believe Are Real shows panels from an educational comic in an issue of Look magazine showing Dr. Mickey Mouse testing sulfa drugs on common mice.
 * Future Imperfect: In Photoplasty contest 26 Dramatic Movies They'll Make About Modern History, the "Anonymous" and "Riot Cop Superstar" entries and a couple others appear to imply this.

G

 * The Generic Guy: Bucholz isn't very generic, but compared to all the other columnists, he's notable for being Cracked's foremost "columnist with no outstanding warrants".
 * Bucholz is one of the only columnists who paints himself as someone with at least a little common sense and morals, however the subject of the articles themselves are some of the craziest of the bunch, including: things learned breaking into P. Diddy's house, guides for using occupy wall street to pick up chicks, people who are accidentally stalking actress Helen Mirren, attacking animals with a bicycle chain, and crashing a royal wedding.
 * Germans Love David Hasselhoff: In-universe again. "7 Things From America That Are Insanely Popular Overseas." And yes, the Trope Namers is at the top of the list.
 * Getting Crap Past the Radar:
 * "The 6 Creepiest Things Ever Slipped Into Children's Cartoons."
 * 8 Filthy Jokes Hidden in Ancient Works of Art.
 * 6 Insane Disney Comics You Won't Believe Are Real shows panels from a 1953 Scrooge comic book where what at first looks like a fight between Goldie and Scrooge (given the sound effects and smoke emanating from the cabin) turns out to be something "not a hangin' offense in Langry, Texas, or anywhere else".
 * Giant Flyer: Argentavis is #5 of 7 (Thankfully) Extinct Giant Versions of Modern Animals.
 * GIFT: Hey, Let's Fix The Internet
 * Go-Karting with Bowser: Mario's numerous roles are evidence of a multiverse in the #15 Science Lesson As Taught by Famous Video Games.
 * Good Cop, Bad Cop: Parodied here along with They Fight Crime, Ripped from the Headlines and countless other Cop Show clichés.
 * A Good Name for a Rock Band: Pops up on occasion.
 * Grail in the Garbage: 5 Pieces of Junk That Turned Out To Be Invaluable Artifacts
 * Groundhog Day Loop: 10 Life Lessons That 'Tetris' Can Teach You
 * Ground Pound: Mid-air direction changes and surviving falls are the #9 Science Lesson As Taught by Famous Video Games.
 * Growing Up Sucks: Daniel O'Brien has written two articles about why growing up sucks; however, both Gladstone and Brockway have written articles explaining why it doesn't suck. John Cheese, meanwhile, has written at least one from each perspective.
 * This is increasingly a focus of the articles; possibly because at least two of the columnists are now parents. There have been at least two articles on the subject of the economy and how tough it is to be not poor anymore.

H

 * Handicapped Badass: Among Jorden Weir's 5 People Whose Major Disabilities Only Made Them Stronger are a legless mountain climber and a blind pilot.
 * Have a Gay Old Time: In The 5 Most Absurd Superhero Names of All-Time, Maxwell Yezpitelok mentions the World War II-era comic book examples of The Gay Ghost as well as "hav[ing] never felt so queer" in Flick Falcon.
 * Heal Thyself, Healing Factor, Healing Hands, Healing Potion, Healing Shiv:
 * Among the 7 Video Game Healing Methods Least Likely to Actually Work
 * The #22 Science Lesson As Taught by Famous Video Games is a medkit, and #9 is "Green Heart + Red Heart = Full Health".
 * One of 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games is that "first aid kits are absorbed through osmosis".
 * A healing factor is portrayed as undesirable in 6 Awesome Superpowers (That Would Suck in Real Life) because the intense pain would lead to post-traumatic stress disorder.
 * Heroes Gone Fishing: One of 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games is that "your princess can always wait a little longer" to complete a Fishing Minigame.
 * Heroic Bystander: 5 Unknown Schmucks Who Turned Into Superheroes in the Clutch and 6 Nobodies Who Turned Into Superheroes Without Warning.
 * Heroic Dolphins: Cracked deconstructs this by listing dolphins in both The 6 Biggest Assholes In The Animal Kingdom and The 6 Cutest Animals That Can Still Destroy You.
 * Heroic Mime: Mark Hill calls inexplicably mute player characters in plot-heavy games the #4 Reason Video Games Have Terrible Stories.
 * High-Pressure Blood: One of 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games is that "a person's volume of blood often exceeds 78 liters."
 * Hiroshima as a Unit of Measure: Someone who is especially out of their mind is often described as "Gary Busey crazy."
 * Historical Badass Upgrade: They like to do this to Theodore Roosevelt.
 * History Marches On: Six terrifying sci-fi predictions (of 1997)
 * Home Porn Movie: It's a worse idea than you think, according to Ian Fortey.
 * Horse of a Different Color: One of 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games is that "if you have the right saddle, you can ride on freaking anything."
 * Hourglass Plot: Real Life example. Cracked started off as a ripoff of Mad Magazine that eventually sputtered out and died...until it went online. Now the ripoff is extremely popular while the original is struggling to stay afloat. The website, of course, takes the opportunity to take a few digs at Mad for this.
 * Human Mail: The 5 Most Badass Ways People Escaped from Slavery relates the story of Henry "Box" Brown, an African-American slave in Virginia successfully escaped to Philadelphia inside a crate and later bragged about how he did it. Slavery opponent Frederick Douglass was infuriated because he wanted this escape method to be kept secret so that other slaves could use it.
 * Humanoid Aliens: Some xenobiologists argue that convergent evolution to a humanoid form is more likely than Starfish Aliens, according to #1 of 5 Unrealistic Movie Cliches That Are Scientifically Accurate.
 * Hyperactive Metabolism:
 * One of 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games is that "eating food you find in the trash is good for you."
 * Humanoid Abomination: Brockway, over the course of a drug-addled gossip-magazine-sponsored day-long interview, slowly comes to learn that this applies to
 * See Popsicle Pete? That is not the voice of a Down's Syndrome-looking ginger in a marching band outfit.
 * 's nature as a creature not meant to walk this Earth has been further documented.
 * Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: 6 Great Movies Where People Are Hunted for Sport.
 * Hyperactive Metabolism: One of the 7 Video Game Healing Methods Least Likely to Actually Work
 * Hypocritical Humor: A subtle and recurring theme of "Cracked TV" is that the Real Life Michael Swaim is just as guilty of all the things that his character criticizes about everyone else. This was dropped in "Does Not Compute", where the focus is on more "out there" topics.

I
""I typed in porn, and porn came up! I typed in breakfast, and porn came up! It's the perfect system!""
 * Idiosyncratic Titles: "X Normal Description (Weird Criteria)"
 * Ignorant of Their Own Ignorance: Gladstone lists 4 Douches Who Amazingly Don't Seem to Know They Suck. These include people who use a handicap tag for parking without actually needing one, people who grow weary of their customer service job, drivers who honk at other drivers merging onto a highway, and people who overreact to minor inconveniences.
 * I Just Want to Be Normal: Not everyone does. One of 4 Things Movies Always Get Wrong About Awkward People is that people with No Social Skills necessarily want to be cured.
 * Immortal Procreation Clause: 6 Horrifying Implications of Awesome Fantasy Movie Universes mentions Middle-earth in the time of The Lord of the Rings, claiming that "no one in the Elfish kingdom is getting any, anywhere."
 * Incredibly Lame Pun: From 6 Iconic Jobs That Are Going Away Forever, on axes: "Firefighter: Sorry sir, I need to ax you something. Ahah. Laugh or I won't save your family."
 * Infinite Flashlight: Photoplasty advertises it in Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games.
 * In Name Only: There's literally nothing carrying over from the magazine save for the title.
 * In the Future, Humans Will Be One Race: In 5 Reasons You Should Be in a Mixed-Race Relationship, Christina H proposes worldwide miscegenation to promote cultural understanding and calls it "The Only Thing That Will Literally Get Rid of Race".
 * In Universe Game Clock: Taking 10 minutes to climb a stairway is the #11 Science Lesson As Taught by Famous Video Games, and accelerated crop growth as seen in farm simulation video games such as Harvest Moon series and Farmville is #6.
 * Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: Photoplasty advertises two variants in "Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games": #23 and #16.
 * Interchangeable Antimatter Keys: Photoplasty advertises it in Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games.
 * Intercourse with You: Discussed in an article about modern annoyances with evolutionary explanations.
 * Intimate Healing: 5 Doctors Who Just Gave The World's Worst Medical Advice retells a CBS13 Sacramento story about a doctor who saw a woman with an oversensitive gag reflex and prescribed giving fellatio to her husband. PONOS to MOOTH, indeed.
 * The Internet Is for Porn: Constantly referenced. Two notable uses: Swaim watching pornography and describing what he sees to the viewer (because Cracked is ostensibly a family website and they won't host actual porn), and in The Web Of Sites, part of the Agents series, Swaim finally learns that the internet exists and says:


 * Intrepid Reporter: Sometimes the columnists write out 1st person stories, sometimes it's about them doing article research. Special mention goes to Chris Bucholz, who seems to do hands-on reporting 80% of the time.
 * Ironic Hell: 16 Appropriate Punishments for Everyday Annoyances
 * It's a Costume Party, I Swear: The #6 Real Old-Timey Photograph That Will Give You Nightmares
 * I Want My Jetpack: 8 Movie Futures Already Proven Wrong

J

 * Jump Physics: Mid-air direction changes and surviving falls are the #9 Science Lesson As Taught by Famous Video Games.
 * Jumping the Shark: Adam Tod Brown wrote in 5 Reasons Sharks Don't Deserve Their Own Week that Discovery Channel's Shark Week programming block needs to end because sharks have so many Weaksauce Weaknesses that they have jumped themselves.
 * Just a Stupid Accent: Called The 4th Stupidest Way Movies Deal with Foreign Languages.

K

 * Kick the Son of a Bitch: Robert Brockway mentions killing an old woman for her eyeglasses in Fallout: New Vegas, having taken the Four-Eyes trait and didn't find glasses anywhere else; however
 * The Krampus: Mentioned here.

L
""In Marvel world, the odds of winding up with super powers are less than half the chance of being hit by lightning (although to be fair, being hit by lightning in the Marvel universe would probably give you superpowers)."
 * Lamarck Was Right: Grandchildren of people who had lived through famine were less likely to catch diabetes. Mice exposed to enriched learning environments had offspring with improved memory This apparent Lamarckian inheritance is the third creepiest thing hiding in your DNA.
 * Lampshade Hanging: Discussed in 6 Reasons Video Games Have Terrible Stories. When explaining why the Heroic Mime is the #4 reason, Mark Hill notes: "Also note that winking references to the problem don't actually solve it."
 * Language Equals Thought:
 * 5 Insane Ways Words Can Control Your Mind
 * 5 Complex Languages Invented by One (Crazy) Person by Chris Bucholz mentions Lojban, a language of logic whose goals include "more rapid and accurate thinking."
 * Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics: The 5 Most Popular Ways Statistics Are Used to Lie to You covers some fallacies commonly used to lie with statistics.
 * Life Imitates Art:
 * One of the 4 Realizations That Will Ruin Science Fiction for You.
 * And comic books too. 5 Important Things You Won't Believe Comic Books Invented shows how Elvis Presley's appearance, Minecraft, and even ankle bracelets for monitoring criminals came from old comic books.
 * Lightning Can Do Anything: Lampshaded in the "6 Horrifying Implications of Awesome Fantasy Movie Universes".


 * Limit Break: The #5 Science Lesson As Taught by Famous Video Games is that one in five men can transform under stress.
 * Loads and Loads of Roles: The 6 Most Mind-Blowing Ways Your Brain Can Malfunction mentions the "Fregoli delusion" that several distinct people that someone meets are one person who quickly changes clothes, named after a stage actor famous for quickly changing into different costumes.
 * Locked in a Room: The Most Horrifying Writers Room Ever.
 * Loophole Abuse: The 6 Most Creative Abuses Of Loopholes. Highlights include buying 12,000+ cups of pudding to earn millions of free airline miles.
 * Lunacy: #5 of 5 Unrealistic Movie Cliches That Are Scientifically Accurate explains moon fear as the result of a rise in lion attacks on the first few days after the full moon once the lions have become hungrier.
 * Lyrical Dissonance: The 5 Most Insane Teams in the History of Sports describes an incident in the 1990s when the Canadian Football League was attempting to expand into the United States. At one game, the Canadian national anthem was sung to the tune of "O Christmas Tree".

M

 * Made of Explodium:
 * Things That Shouldn't Explode But Did Anyway lists things that seemingly were made of explodium at some point, even an office chair!
 * Photoplasty advertises lots of explosive things in Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games.
 * Magic A Is Magic A:
 * Even fantasy stories need some consistent ground rules on which to build a conflict. Handwaving lack of internal consistency with extreme applications of Bellisario's Maxim is discussed in #3 of 6 Common Movie Arguments That Are Always Wrong.
 * From 8 Classic Movies That Got Away With Gaping Plot Holes: "at least follow the rules you freaking made up."
 * Magical Defibrillator: When used by a teammate in a video game, one of the 7 Video Game Healing Methods Least Likely to Actually Work
 * Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Spoofed here in a Trope Overdosed video that also includes a Spit Take, It's Not You, It's Me, Victorian Novel Disease, Incurable Cough of Death...
 * This sketch mocks this trope thoroughly. Bonus points for actually using the exact name of the trope.
 * Mayfly-December Romance: Discussed in a couple articles.
 * 7 Awesome Super Powers (Ruined by Science), #1: Immortality.
 * One of the 6 Horrifying Implications of Classic Christmas Movies is that in Fred Claus, Santa Claus's immortal immediate family suffers from what the article calls the "Highlander Complex": "They will have to watch their friends and relatives wither and die right before their callous, eternal eyes."
 * Mayincatec: Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl decorates an Aztec chest with an illustration of an Inca god, as pointed out by Ruy Platt in 27 Movie Details That Research Proves Are B.S.
 * Mean Character, Nice Actor: Johnny Depp and others in 5 Heartwarming Stories to Restore Your Faith in Celebrities.
 * Meganekko: Katie Willert from After Hours.
 * Method Acting: The 5 Craziest Ways Famous Actors Got into Character mentions Adrien Brody, Tom Cruise, and more.
 * Mighty Whitey: Cracked loves to accuse film and other entertainment companies of racism and sexism, despite the fact that their writing staff has always been composed almost exclusively by white males. As such, they both satirize and play this trope straight at the same time.
 * When a Chinese-American woman joined the team, each of her articles' comments have been filled with almost nothing but contempt for her for being non-white and female.
 * A Million Is a Statistic: Explained beautifully in David Wong's Monkeysphere article.
 * Mirror Routine: The 6 Most Mind-Blowing Ways Your Brain Can Malfunction mentions a mental disorder called mirrored-self misidentification, in which someone looking into a mirror believes that the monster in the mirror is an intruder performing a Mirror Routine, not oneself.
 * Mirror Scare: 14 different kinds.
 * Misaimed Fandom: 6 Tricks Movies Use to Make Sure You Root for the Right Guy lists tools used to prevent this reaction.
 * Mistaken for Racist: The author of this article explains how a video he made (called "Straya Day") came back to bite him after this happened because of too many people watching it not realizing it was satirical.
 * Money Spider: Monsters having internal gold sacs is one of 27 Science Lessons As Taught by Famous Video Games and one of 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games.
 * Monumental Damage: The Statue of Liberty is the #1 Iconic Building That Was Barely Saved from Destruction because "when Lady Liberty gets destroyed, it means the apocalypse is here".
 * Mood Dissonance: Discussed in "The 5 Most Badass Musical Instruments Ever Built": "If you could kill Bond with your Nanoguitar pick, you'd use the Laser Harp you'd to wipe out the rest of MI 6 in one hellish afternoon of fire, blood, and inappropriately mellow tunes."
 * Mook Maker: Photoplasty advertises it in Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games.
 * Most Writers Are Writers: Sometimes results in a staggering lack of perspective, both discussed and within the articles themselves.
 * 6 Things Movies Love to Get Wrong About the Workplace discusses how Hollywood films get other professions wrong by extrapolating from the experiences of Hollywood writers.
 * This article about intellectual property (which it calls Forced Artificial Scarcity, or FArtS) uses only copyrighted works of authorship (that is, media) as examples, failing to mention potential examples of patented works of engineering (that is, inventions) that arguably power more of the economy.
 * The Movie: If Flash games and other websites got movies.
 * Mr. Fanservice & Even the Guys Want Him: Swaim for his lack of a shirt and DOB for his boyish looks. John Cheese too.
 * Seanbaby gets fairly frequent comments from straight men who'd like to have his children.
 * Soren Bowie, who regularly has to cull his booty call lists and frequently gets compliments on his handsomeness from guys (who also explicitly mention their heterosexuality).
 * Mundane Made Awesome: Agents of Cracked Season 2: The Overly Dramatic Trailer
 * These pictures.
 * Mundane Utility:
 * Tony Stark using his repulsor ray to toast bread of all things is one of several Idiotic Real World Uses of Awesome Fictional Technology.
 * A later Photoplasty added more. 22 Terrible Ways We Would Use Sci-Fi Technology include using a Star Wars lightsaber to chop a cucumber, or using Doc Ock's tentacles to serve food to customers at a restaurant.
 * Musical Episode: If Everything Got Adapted into a Broadway Musical

N
""[A]nd Jack O'Brien plus a huge bag of X gave us a Cracked office party that we're still not allowed to blog about.""
 * Name's the Same: Christina H (aka "Mortal Wombat") writes the "Let Me Tell You About My Cats" column. She is not to be confused with Kristi Harrison (aka "hereinidaho"), who writes "Kristi A-Go-Go".
 * Network Decay: In-universe. Subject of The TLC Experiment: Just How Dumb is The Learning Channel?
 * Another one was done on the History Channel.
 * New Media Are Evil: In "4 Reasons 'Hemlock Grove' Is Television's Shitty Future", J. F. Sargent claims that unlike reading, TV discourages analysis and critical thinking in favor of "passively absorbing it like a big sopping couch-sponge." People just stop noticing padding and other hallmarks of sloppy writing. Hemlock Grove is guilty.
 * New Powers as the Plot Demands: One of the 4 Realizations That Will Ruin Science Fiction for You.
 * Nice Guys Finish Last: Being too nice is one of 5 Innocent Things That Science Says Make People Hate You. Hence "negging".
 * The Nicknamer: DOB tends to give nicknames to everyone that change every time he refers to them in rapid succession. The nicknames are either puns, insults, terms of endearment, or a disturbing combination of all three.
 * And they're all usually directed at his boss Jack O'Brien. To name a few: Jaxploitation, Jack to the Future, Jackbook Air, Jacts of Life, etc.
 * Nintendo Hard: The 10 Most Irritatingly Impossible Old-School Video Games.
 * No Budget: A Photoplasty considers what would have happened If 40 Famous Movies Had $50 Budgets.
 * Noodle Incident: The opening of this article says:

"(No, we didn't get the names mixed up -- Clyde is the video game villain, Wizard is the cabbie. Go figure.)"
 * No OSHA Compliance: OSHA is mentioned by name in #6 of 6 Sci-Fi Movie Conventions (That Need to Die).
 * Not Making This Up Disclaimer:
 * On The 7 Ballsiest Sports Cheats Ever, one of the cheaters looks so much like one they have to use this trope.
 * On a Mazes and Monsters cover; "This is not Photoshop."
 * They use this when talking about Mr. Kellogg's use of circumcision and Corn Flakes to combat masturbation.
 * On Real Life supervillians; Mussolini's evil lair. Seriously. That is not Photoshop.
 * From 5 Animal Rights Campaigns That Managed to Screw Over Animals, about the dogs rescued from Michael Vick's dogfighting ring:
 * One of the survivors was put in a program called Paws for Tales, where kids too shy to read aloud to human audiences practice their reading skills in front of dogs. No, really. That's not a sarcastic fake program we made up. (And that's not a stock image. That's Jonny Justice, the actual dog we're talking about.)
 * Early in "5 Movies For Kids That Stole Their Plot from Adult Movies", Mark Hill and JM McNab intentionally switch the setups of The Santa Clause and An American Werewolf in London, assuming that readers will get the joke. But later, when comparing Wizard from Taxi Driver to Clyde from Wreck-It Ralph, they comment on the former's video-game-character-like name and feel the need to point this out:


 * Not the Nessie: Photoplasty Famous Images, As Seen From a Different Angle depicts an elephant swimming and putting its trunk above the water as a snorkel, forming the famous photo of the Loch Ness monster.

O

 * Obvious Rule Patch: Plenty of them resulted from events described in Xavier Jackson's 5 Dumb Ways People Have Won at Sports.
 * Old Media Are Evil: Though most Cracked writers are perfectly willing to make fun of the internet too, articles like 6 Subtle Ways The News Media Disguises Bullshit As Fact, 7 Clearly Fake News Stories That Fooled The Mainstream Media, and 5 Awesome Cases of The Internet Owning The Mainstream Media show a pretty strong bias. Old entertainment media fares no better than news media, with articles like 5 Reasons The Oscars Matter Even Less Than You Thought and 6 Cheap Acting Tricks That Fool The Critics Every Time.
 * Old Shame: Conversed in Six Musicians With Pasts They Hope You'll Forget
 * Older Than They Think:
 * Discussed in 7 Modern Conveniences That Are Way Older Than You Think, which mentions Persian air conditioning, Roman shopping malls, Neanderthal medicine, and more.
 * 6 Forms of Modern Depravity (Way Older Than Your Grandpa) shows late medieval Scottish rap battles, Japanese Edo period celebrity culture associated with the Kardashians, the Furry Fandom in ancient Rome, medieval Catholic acceptance of gay marriage, and late medieval treehuggers in India.
 * Once Per Episode: A bust photo of a large-breasted woman with only a single button closed on her shirt and nothing underneath is shoehorned into the majority of the lists, which usually hang a Lampshade Hanging on it when she appears.
 * They eventually ID'd her in this article. Her name is Kate, and she has a face.
 * It stares into our souls.
 * One-Hit Kill: One of 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games is that "no matter how strong and powerful you are, some scrub will take you out with a death spell."
 * One-Man Army: The 6 Most Epic One Man Armies in the History of War.
 * One of Us: Or at least one of them. Seeing how this page mentions TV Tropes twice and links to it three times, this is a safe bet of at least one editor.
 * One Size Fits All: Photoplasty advertises one-size-fits-all armor in Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games.
 * Only You Can Repopulate My Race: In the 2011 All CGI Cartoon Rio, Blu is the last blue macaw left. The article 6 Disturbing Unanswered Questions from Children's Movies shows what would probably happen in the next generation: Brother-Sister Incest in the next generation would result in infertility.
 * Orange-Blue Contrast:
 * Called the #4 annoying trend that makes every movie look the same.
 * Why the New 'Hunger Games' Movie Is Orange and Blue discusses this color scheme in the second Hunger Games film.
 * Oscar Bait: Discussed in the "A Trailer for Every Academy Award Winning Movie Ever", and also in this article.
 * Out-of-Character Moment: JM McNab's 5 Childhood-Ruining Appearances from Famous Characters explains how Winnie the Pooh Took a Level in Jerkass toward his neighbors in the Hundred Acre Wood in Disney's 1980s comic strip adaptation.
 * Overly Narrow Superlative: Edouard Manet? Best.19th Century French Impressionist Painter Whose Last Name Is One Letter Away From Another French Impressionist. Ever!

P

 * Parallel Porn Titles:
 * Video: Do you have what it takes to title porn?
 * The 10 Most Misleadingly Pornographic Movie Titles]lists movies that could be mistaken for their own parallel porn title. It even lists which scenes could be kept unchanged.
 * Girth, Wind and Fire. An article about unappealing porn titles notes that a much better title would have been Sperm, Bend & Tie Her.
 * Parody of Evolution: The #14 Science Lesson As Taught by Famous Video Games is an allusion to Rudolph Zallinger's illustration "The March of Progress" done with game sprites.
 * The Password Is Always Swordfish: Not always, but The 10 Biggest Password Mistakes People Make lists a few that several "million uncreative bastards" end up thinking of under time pressure.
 * Percussive Maintenance: "I've even seen people who insist that their televisions or vehicles require a special touch that only they know, a touch that usually turns out to be a pretty substantial punch or kick, which I guess makes their superpower physical abuse?"
 * Perspective Flip / POV Sequel: 28 Great Movies From the Perspective of Minor Characters
 * And now 26 Great Movies from the Villain's Point of View.
 * Pet the Dog: "Give Them a Dog" is #6 of 6 Tricks Movies Use to Make Sure You Root for the Right Guy.
 * Pink Girl, Blue Boy: It used to be inverted. #5 of 5 Gender Stereotypes That Used To Be the Exact Opposite is that pink being for girls is a recent idea.
 * Pink Product Ploy: Mocked in "The 5 Most Pointlessly Women-Specific Products".
 * Planet of Hats: This is #3 of 6 Sci-Fi Movie Conventions (That Need to Die).
 * Poe's Law: The 5 Most Epic Backfires in the History of Bad Jokes. From the lead: "The problem with sarcasm is that you can do it so well (or so poorly) that people don't realize you're joking."
 * Police Are Useless: One of 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games is that police cars in a BeatEmUp are just for decoration. "Only trust your fists; police will never help you."
 * The Pollyanna: What Pollyanna calls "the glad game" and others call "counting their blessings" is a coping mechanism that Felix Clay calls "trivializing adversity" in 4 Ways We Don't Realize We Suck at Coping With Adversity.
 * Porn Stash: Stashes of erotic magazines and VHS tapes are one of 7 Ridiculously Outdated Assumptions Every Movie Makes.
 * Power-Up Food: One of 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games is that "weakling + Amanita mushroom = bodybuilder."
 * The President's Daughter: There used to be an article called "6 Helpful Tips for Kidnapping the President's Daughters," which was taken down after the person who wrote it, DOB, was confronted by the FBI and Secret Service.
 * Promoted Fanboy: 5 Celebrities Who Got Famous by Being Obsessed Fan Boys

Q

 * Queer People Are Funny: Seanbaby is possibly the worst offender.
 * Quote Swear Unquote: Claims adding swearing to the lyrics of "You're the Best Around" would make it even better.

R
"The text does not mention whether [the sculptures have evolved cavernous maws and a dark, endless hunger, so we are forced to assume they have.]"
 * Race Lift:
 * "Make Them American, Even if They're Not" is #3 of 6 Tricks Movies Use to Make Sure You Root for the Right Guy.
 * In The 5 Most Insulting Defenses of Nerd Racism, J.F. Sargent defends the practice of sacrificing fidelity to the source comics in superhero films.
 * Rashomon Style: "Who Killed Ian Fortey?" Was also Ian's last article as a columnist.
 * Rated "M" for Manly: The 8 Manliest Images on the Internet
 * And let's not forget The 9 Manliest Names in the World
 * Pretty much everything Seanbaby does, but especially his "Man Comics", and its even manlier spinoff "Fuckin'-A Comics".
 * Brockway's column is titled "Robert Brockway: Word Puncher".
 * And then there's Seanbaby's column, "Flying Blind on a Rocket Cycle", the art for which features him dropkicking Hitler in the face.
 * Reality Is Unrealistic:
 * They have so far published well over a dozen lists of "Images You Won't Believe Aren't Photoshopped".
 * 5 True Stories Cut from Movies for Being Too Unrealistic lists "mind-blowing moments from real life that Hollywood decided were too fantastic", such as John Dillinger taking three people hostage in Public Enemies but 17 in real life.
 * Regenerating Health:
 * The regeneration in first-person shooters since Faceball 2000 is the #23 Science Lesson As Taught by Famous Video Games.
 * One of 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games is to "duck and cover and stay put until you are fully healed."
 * Re Lex: A Northern California argot called Boontling is one of 5 secret languages that stuck it to the man. It uses English grammar but replaces many of the content words.
 * Required Secondary Powers: Discussed in 7 Awesome Super Powers (Ruined by Science) and 6 Awesome Superpowers (That Would Suck in Real Life). For example, being able to throw lightning would require immunity to effects on sight and hearing similar to those of stun grenades, and force fields would need immunity to Not the Fall That Kills You.
 * Retronym: One of Winston Rowntree's The 4 Reasons We Fall in Love With a Piece of Pop Culture is that it's "porn", which he defines as any cultural work "that you seek out to animalistically fill a specific need." He runs through a bunch of things jokingly called porn, coining the retronym "Sex Porn" in the process.
 * Reverse Polarity: This is #4 of 6 Sci-Fi Movie Conventions (That Need to Die).
 * Ribcage Stomach: The #8 Real Old-Timey Photograph That Will Give You Nightmares is of an amusement park's souvenir shop whose decoration invokes this.
 * Ridiculously Human Robot: Swaim, evidently.
 * Rivals Team Up: The 5 Most Insane Teams in the History of Sports calls the Steagles, an alliance of longtime rival NFL teams from Pennsylvania when most of their regular players were drafted to fight World War II, "too stupid even for a sports movie".
 * Rock Beats Laser: "Make Them Technologically Inferior" is #5 of the 6 Tricks Movies Use to Make Sure You Root for the Right Guy.
 * Rubber Band AI: Listed as the number 2 most annoying video game character (Anyone who does it).
 * Rule of Cool/Rule of Funny: Cracked has refined these into a logical heuristic, frequently stating that given a lack of concrete evidence as to what happened, we are forced to assume the most bizarre, awesome, and/or ridiculous scenario.
 * The Rule of First Adopters: One of 22 Terrible Ways We Would Use Sci-Fi Technology is using a Franchise/StarTrek replicator to make a sex toy. It wouldn't be a stretch from real-life 3D printed sex toys though.
 * Rules of the Road: Several in 32 Alternate Interpretations of Common Warning Signs
 * Running Gag: Many themes recur over similar articles, usually referencing particularly popular articles.
 * Praise of Theodore Roosevelt's super-human powers in the art of violence now spans topics, articles and lists.
 * Many of the articles feature an outlandish assumption on the part of the writer, in the formula: "Reports do not say if [X crazy thing] happened, so we're forced to assume it did."

"...which means if you put a jellyfish in the space shuttle, and it fired its stingers at the moment of takeoff, it would travel back in time [citation needed.]"
 * [Citation needed]..


 * The word "Baffling" is often used in titles of articles.
 * Similar to their love of Roosevelt is their love of Nikola Tesla, and their complete and utter ball-crushing hatred of Thomas Edison. Like Roosevelt, this is because the things you could make up about either man in favor of their position on said man are only slightly less exaggerated than real life.
 * Have we mentioned Australia yet? Well, Cracked does a lot...
 * Can be taken to exasperating extremes when the writers start taking potshots at other cultures' idiosyncrasies for the sake of a laugh. One or two jokes is one thing, but... well, see for yourself. Worse, the cultural jokes aren't just annoying, they're frequently wrong.
 * At least it's justified whenever they're bashing North Korea.
 * Ke$ha's debauchery is becoming a fairly common theme...
 * "Gary Busey crazy" was often used when mentioning something they considered insane. Often including an image of the man himself.
 * Whenever they are in doubt of what picture they should use for an article, they will frequently use reuse the same photo of a woman's large cleavage.
 * Several articles have been devoted to the over-the-top mean, weird, or just plain laughable antics of world dictators, especially North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il.
 * They also love spiders.
 * Also, they have a running gag where they'll explain that X does (action) because fuck Y, that's why.
 * Additionally, Al Gore invented the internet.
 * And among the columnists, Brockway's drug use, Soren's social superiority, Swaim's freaky kinks, Dan's nicknaming, and Bulchoz's Canadian roots.
 * They also tend to bring up the infamous "I'm Han Solo" from Kinect Star Wars.

S
"BOD: You know, I remember reading somewhere that there are only two truly meaningful things you can do with your doppleganger when you're locked in a room. You can fight them... Or f*** them.
 * Save Scumming: How time works with this in play is the #17 Science Lesson As Taught by Famous Video Games.
 * Science Is Bad: "7 Ways Science will kill you by X" is practically a template. Only matched by the number of articles about horrifying animals.
 * Scope Snipe: In the Vietnam War, Carlos Hathcock landed the #3 Most Impossible Sniper Shot Ever Made.
 * The Scream: Photoplasty Famous Images, As Seen From a Different Angle shows what the figure in Edvard Munch's painting was screaming at: Superman.
 * Screw Yourself: Mentioned in a few articles, including one by Dan O'Brien that's almost entirely about the subject. Said article is referenced when Dan meets his counterpart from Broked.com's Similar Squad in Agents of Cracked.


 * Dan takes a fighting stance*

BOD: Wrong answer."

"The teen unemployment rate is 27.3 percent, an all-time high that's staggering compared to the national American rate of 6 percent. We are officially going through the Muppet Babies reboot of the Great Depression."
 * Scunthorpe Problem:
 * 6 Spectacularly Failed Attempts to Be Politically Correct tells how Microsoft banned an Xbox 360 user from Xbox Live for being from Fort Gay, West Virginia.
 * Seen on Cracked itself in the comments section, due to a word filter that targets a given word sequence even as part of a larger word. For instance, the racial slur "Jap" is rendered as "J*p" so that it'll also catch "Japs" and turn it into "J*ps", and consequently the comments on an article about Japanese subcultures talked about "j*pan" (in lowercase). This makes writing "j*panese" a bit of a problem. "Cum" is also banned, so you can't say "doc*mentary". "Cock" is banned as well, which is a problem since most of the site is made of dick jokes. "Spic" makes it a problem writing the word "susp*cious". We could list a whole bunch of examples. Basically, their filter s*cks d*ck.
 * The main problem is that the article will usually curse up a storm, while the comments section is censored. The problem is why they would need to censor it at all when the site's main demographic is 18-34 year old males who wouldn't be offended by cursing. Now you can say that it's the server's policy not to host foul language, but again: why is it that the article can say "fuck shit piss" all they want while the community is treated like children? Do they really think that a site like that is going to be visited by 8 year olds?
 * The issue isn't about profanity, but appearance. They most likely don't want to look like a den of hate, which is why most of the censoring is centered around slurs.
 * Seen It All: Losing the ability to be surprised by entertainment is one of 5 Warning Signs That You're Finally Getting Older. Entertainment will ruin your life with or without tropes.
 * Seinfeldian Conversation: The series After Hours is built on this trope.
 * Self-Deprecation: Everyone who contributes to Cracked are always most likely to take a cheap shot at people that are like them, or Cracked itself. The main contributors are also likely to talk about how much of an asshole they are, the sad fact that they write internet articles, and that they work at a headquarters that serves gruel-like slop and doesn't have indoor plumbing.
 * Christina H frequently laments how fat and ugly she is, even while explaining why women tend to have artificially low opinions of themselves.
 * Self-Insert Fic: A good amount of Dan O'Brien's stuff is this, depicting himself as a Jerkass fond of annoying the protagonists and lampshade hanging.
 * Serial Killer: There are two lists of serial-killer animals.
 * Serious Business: Rad, a film where the entire culture of a town is built around BMX, is cited in "The 4 Weirdest Lessons '80s Movies Really Wanted to Teach Us" as the most ridiculous example of a hobby that saves the world.
 * Severely Specialized Store: Photoplasty advertises a store that sells only three things, like those in The Legend of Zelda series, in Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games.
 * Sexy Whatever Outfit: Parodied.
 * Shameless Self Promoter: Pick up "Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody" on book stands now.
 * Shared when other Cracked columnists also help with promoting Brockway's book.
 * And of course, David Wong will never let us forget that he wrote a book once.
 * And now with the release of the first Cracked.com book they've been even more blunt with no less than two full articles advertising it.
 * Shoplift and Die: One of 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games is to avert this by putting a basket on the shopkeeper's head. "Robbery is easier than you think."
 * Single Biome Planet: Part of #3 of 6 Sci-Fi Movie Conventions (That Need to Die).
 * Sitcom Arch Nemesis: Apparently Adam is Gladstone's.
 * Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: The articles are, for the most part, quite cynical.
 * Skewed Priorities: "[Circumcision] can result in death, or even worse, loss of the penis."
 * Smart People Wear Glasses: #4 of 5 Unrealistic Movie Cliches That Are Scientifically Accurate points out a study finding that intelligence and education are somehow correlated with nearsightedness in real life.
 * Tastes Like Purple / Mushroom Samba: "...and when you're walking down a road made out of wind and purple, you'll know you're tripping just the right amount of balls."
 * The Smart Guy: Gladstone, compared to DOB or Swaim.
 * The Smurfette Principle:
 * Most of the videos on the site have a single female.
 * The 6 Most Bizarre Ways to Lose Popular Video Games describes a pub in the game Dishonored as containing "Havelock the leader, Piero the geeky inventor, and Callista the woman."
 * Sociopathic Hero: Mark Hill calls the requirement for player characters to murder innocent people the #6 Reason Video Games Have Terrible Stories.
 * Sophisticated As Hell: Pretty much all the articles have a hint of this, especially those by the main contributors.
 * This is may be the greatest example of this trope ever.
 * Space Is an Ocean: Mentioned by name in #2 of 6 Sci-Fi Movie Conventions (That Need to Die).
 * Species Surname: In Funny Animal world, Justin Bieber is a beaver. This is illustrated in a Photoplasty ("19 Things Old People Suspect About Modern Culture")
 * Spiky Hair: Photoplasty advertises hair gel that makes it possible in Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games.
 * Spinoff Babies: In 5 Reasons the Classic American Summer Doesn't Exist Anymore, Mark Hill compares mid-2010s teen unemployment to this phenomenon:


 * Springtime for Hitler: 5 Classic Movies Made by People Who Wanted Them to Fail mentions the 1955 romantic dramedy Marty, starring Creator/ErnestBorgnine, which was expected to fail (and save the studio a bundle on income tax) but when its ugly actors ended up resonating as more authentic to viewers, it ended up winning four Academy Awards and a Palme d'Or. The article describes its production as having "literally started out as the plot of The Producers."
 * Sprint Shoes: Photoplasty advertises 30 Second Energy in Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games.
 * Stealth Parody:
 * "6 classic songs that were supposed to be jokes" discusses several examples from music.
 * Cracked has done some of their own. For example, Robert Brockway's "5 Things You Learn From a Lifetime of Screwing Up" is probably a parody of David Wong and John Cheese articles.
 * Stock Footage: Swaim's co-host in Cracked TV, "Clippy", which consists of out-of-context clips from films or viral media, such as "Orientation guy from The Hudsucker Proxy", "Still-lives of fruit alongside Holocaust survivors", and "Clips of chips."
 * Chips clips? TOTALLY RAAAAAAAAAAANDOOOOOOM!
 * Not to mention "Clips of CHiPs".
 * Gladstone changes his shirt in one episode to match stock footage.
 * As of Swaim's new series, his "co-host" is stock footage of various bad Youtube bloggers. Clippy, meanwhile, is having a new body built for him - which, at this time, consists of a can of Monster, a cell phone, a light bulb, and Doritos.
 * And then Clippy came back.
 * Stockholm Syndrome: Cracked accuses Beauty and the Beast of this in 23 Romantic Movies Revised for Honesty and 5 Romantic Movie Gestures That Were Actually Dick Moves.
 * Stupid Sexy Soren!
 * Super Drowning Skills: The Strid is a segment of the River Wharfe in Yorkshire that will murder you. This article compares it to "exactly how water works in a video game".
 * Suspiciously Specific Denial:
 * Robert Brockway loudly and repeatedly interrupts Ian Fortey's last article to insist that he did not kill Ian Fortey, had no reason too, didn't make sure he had the opportunity to and certainly had made no detailed plans to kill him.
 * In 4 Reasons the New Christian Mingle Movie Will Be Hilarious, E. Reid Ross quoted Corbin Bernsen's statement that the film Christian Mingle is "not an ad or paid promotional piece for the dating website" and called it "a load of bullshit" given the evidence that Ross presents later in the article.

T
""TV Tropes is a veritable black hole of hyperlinks, each leading further into the center of oblivion. The entire site is made up of a community that spends its life collecting patterns and commonalities between fictional worlds. It applies names to every plot device, every story arc and every cinematic tool ever captured by a camera and then links them to one another. The result is like being in the mind of a paranoid schizophrenic deciphering hidden codes in newspapers. Clicking on one link will ensure that you click on another, and another until you have lost your way back home and forgotten who you are.""
 * Tactical Suicide Boss: One of 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games is that "it may take a few tries, but life gets easier once you figure out the patterns." The example is from Punch-Out!!.
 * Take That: The tendency to mock Mad Magazine has continued, especially since the magazine's sales figures have been in decline whilst "Cracked" has enjoyed a reasonable amount of success as a website. This article is a good example, which, upon closer reading, can be seen as a "The Reason You Suck" Speech towards Mad.
 * This, aimed squarely at Lady Gaga.
 * Kristi Harrison seemed to start the whole attitude the other writers have towards Zooey Deschanel.
 * Technology Marches On: 6 Technologies Conspicuously Absent From Sci-Fi Movies explores technologies widely available when several well-known science fiction films were first published that would have completely broken their plots: bicycles, night vision goggles, unmanned combat vehicles, Wi-Fi, GPS, and cell phones.
 * Testosterone Poisoning: Mentions of anything remotely Badass will generally include comments relating to testicular fortitude completely unironically. Probably intentional.
 * "Punched your eyeballs right in the dick" is one of the more extreme examples.
 * Many of these Harry Potter book disguises is retardedly manly.
 * These
 * And these.
 * The Tetris Effect: AKA "When Video Games Get Stuck In Your Head"
 * Throw It In: 6 Iconic Movie Scenes That Happened by Accident cites Viggo Mortensen's broken toe in the film of The Lord of the Rings, among others.
 * Time Is Dangerous: 6 Time Travel Realities Doc Brown Didn't Warn Us About.
 * Time Stop: Declared to be the ultimate super power in After Hours' "The Best Super Power (Is Not What You Think)". Specifically, the Zack Morris "Time Out" from Saved by the Bell.
 * Tim Taylor Technology: Mentioned by name in #4 of 6 Sci-Fi Movie Conventions (That Need to Die).
 * Took the Bad Film Seriously: J. F. Sargent lists Kate Beckinsale's performance in the 2012 remake of Total Recall among 5 Amazing Performances Hiding in Terrible Movies, calling her character's lack of Genre Blindness in action sequences "the only thing that works in this whole movie".
 * Toothy Bird: The toothlike serrations inside a penguin's mouth, used to grip fish, are #3 of the 7 Most Terrifying Mouths in Nature.
 * Top Ten List: "The leading source of list-based humor."
 * Tough Act to Follow: "5 Works of Art So Good, They Ruined Their Whole Genre" calls 2001: A Space Odyssey, David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, the film of Fight Club, two Bob Marley albums, and Animal House tough acts to follow in their respective genres.
 * Trailers Always Spoil: E. Reid Ross wrote in 4 Reasons the New Christian Mingle Movie Will Be Hilarious that the whole plot of the film Christian Mingle can be guessed from its trailer. (Unless there's something subversive going on...)
 * Training Montage: Mocked.
 * Translator Microbes: Called The 3rd Stupidest Way Movies Deal with Foreign Languages.
 * Trapped in Another World: One of the 4 Realizations That Will Ruin Science Fiction for You.
 * Trauma Inn: One of the 7 Video Game Healing Methods Least Likely to Actually Work
 * Tree Buchet: #4 on 5 Greatest Animal Escapes
 * Tree-Top Town: The Korowai tribe of Papua New Guinea live in tree houses 100 feet up to escape floods and predators, according to 9 Houses You Won't Believe People Actually Live In and 6 Isolated Groups Who Had No Idea That Civilization Existed.
 * Trope Name: This video takes generic and turns it Up to Eleven for roughly three-and-a-half minutes.
 * Trope Overdosed: This is largely because of their numerous media related articles. Many lists feature tropes.
 * They even occasionally link to this website. So after you're done reading Cracked...
 * And then came TV Tropes: The Movie...
 * The TV Tropes topic.
 * Turns Red: 5 Soldiers Whose Horrific Injuries Only Made Them Angry
 * Tropes Will Ruin Your Life: In An Epic Online Odyssey, TV Tropes plays the part of Charybdis, with YouTube serving as Scylla.


 * Chris Bucholz recently did an article where he claimed he "Once logged in to TV Tropes and didn't come out for eight days."
 * Truman Show Plot: The Truman Show is called one of 6 Movies That Accidentally Recreate Real Mental Illnesses because its plot resembles the real-life delusion that one's life is a reality show, a mental illness investigated by doctors Joel and Ian Gold.
 * Truth in Television: 5 Unrealistic Movie Cliches That Are Scientifically Accurate explores the real-life counterparts of five tropes that are more realistic than they may sound.
 * Twenty Four Hour Armor: One of 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games is that "real men sleep in their armor."
 * 20% More Awesome: A common source of comedy, especially in the articles that centre on charts and graphs.

U

 * Unacceptable Targets: One of the reasons no one laughed at your joke is "It Was About Something They Won't Laugh About, Ever".
 * Unfortunate Implications: 6 Spectacularly Failed Attempts to Be Politically Correct gives a bunch of examples of how attempts to avert Monochrome Casting by including Black people in promotion campaigns ended up tripping over stereotypes about fried chicken, watermelon, and wanting to be white.
 * The Unintelligible: Depending on the article, people either understand what Chris Bucholz is saying or see him as entirely unintelligible as no one can decipher the gibberish language he calls ‘Canadian English.’
 * Universal Adaptor Cast: Mario's numerous roles are evidence of a multiverse in the #15 Science Lesson As Taught by Famous Video Games.
 * Unproblematic Prostitution: The Oldest Profession may be older even than humanity, as it appears to emerge in the presence of money. 6 Things You Won't Believe Animals Do Just Like Us describes several experiments in which researchers introduced money to communities of monkeys. In one, a female monkey ended up trading sex for money so she could buy some grapes.
 * Uranus Is Showing: "We Needed a Less-Naughty Pronunciation of 'Uranus'" is one of Gladstone's "5 Bafflingly Prudish Moments in History".

V
"Soon, it wasn't uncommon for him to introduce himself at a party and be greeted with "Oh, you're Butterscotch Dinosaur Pussy!""
 * Vendor Trash: Photoplasty advertises a vendor that buys everything, specifically naming items that substitute for Money Spider, in Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games.
 * Verbal Tic Name: According to 5 Ways Life With Tourette's Is Way Weirder Than You Expect, some people with Tourette's are "catchphrase generators". Some tics, such as "butterscotch dinosaur pussy", become this:


 * Very Loosely Based on a True Story: Photoplasty contest 26 Dramatic Movies They'll Make About Modern History varies between this and Based on a Great Big Lie.
 * Video Game 3D Leap: Parodied as the #25 Science Lesson As Taught by Famous Video Games which teaches that the third spatial dimension was discovered in 1996.
 * Video Game Cruelty Potential: Mocked here, then paid back.
 * Seanbaby took this Up to Eleven with this.
 * Robert Brockway has gotten in on the action with Fallout: New Vegas
 * Viewers Are Geniuses: One of the reasons no one laughed at your joke is "They Didn't Have Enough Information to Get It". It states that the best practice for an Inside Joke that relies on knowledge of something obscure like Rocky IV or Battlestar Galactica Classic is to find a discreet way to explain the reference in the setup.
 * Vindicated by History: In-universe. 6 Great Novels that Were Hated in Their Time
 * And Neville Chamberlain.

W

 * Water Is Air: An underwater lake is the #5 most mindblowing thing found underwater.
 * The Watson: #4 of 4 Realizations That Will Ruin Science Fiction for You is that science fiction needs a "straight man" to whom the setting's rules are explained.
 * Waxing Lyrical: Brockway is fond of this. Especially if the song in question is Life is a Highway.
 * We Buy Anything: Photoplasty advertises such a shop in Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games.
 * Welcome to Corneria: "Psychology: People tend to say the same thing over and over" is the #9 Science Lesson As Taught by Famous Video Games.
 * Whale Egg: Pokémon coming from eggs is the #27 Science Lesson As Taught by Famous Video Games.
 * What If: Many of the Photoplasty contests.
 * What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs?: Invoked in The 5 Most Aggressively Crazy Websites on the Internet, where Mark Hill compares Boohbah to "the findings of a scientist adding LSD to baby food."
 * What Could Have Been: Invoked in Photoplasty 21 Real Deleted Scenes That Completely Change Famous Movies.
 * What You Are in the Dark: Robert Brockway is a horrible person according to Fallout: New Vegas
 * Who Wants to Live Forever?: Explored in this article.
 * Why Did It Have to Be Spiders?: Many authors of articles express their hatred and fear of spiders.
 * Wiki Walk: OK, they're not actually a wiki, but it is really easy to get trapped for a long time just by clicking the links at the end of each article. If they were to drop the last two letters, their name would be almost chillingly appropriate. It's a good thing Cracked is free.
 * The addition of the Random Article button does even more to add to it.
 * Writing for the Trade: In "4 Reasons 'Hemlock Grove' Is Television's Shitty Future", J. F. Sargent accuses TV writers of writing shows for Netflix bingers, skimping on the old practice of Once an Episode exposition and expecting people to watch 13 hours of TV in a row. Hemlock Grove is guilty.

Y

 * You Can Panic Now: A staple article topic is a list of mundane items and activities that can kill/maim you.
 * And conversely, things which are hyped as dangerous by films/television/news media etc., and in fact are not nearly as dangerous as made out to be.
 * You Gotta Have Blue Hair: Photoplasty advertises hair dye in impossible colors in Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games.
 * Youngest Child Wins: #6 on this list shows that the older children will have more health problems than the younger ones based on order of birth.

Z

 * Zero-G Spot: Shot down in 6 Reasons Space Travel Will Always Suck.
 * Zombie Apocalypse:
 * One of Cracked's favorite subjects for lists and parodies.
 * Deconstructed in David Dietle's 7 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Outbreak Would Fail (Quickly). For one thing, maggots and gut flora would devour the undead.