The 40 Best Cracked Articles and Videos of 2013
2013 was a historically bad year for Congress and health care websites, but it was Cracked's best year ever, and these 25 articles were so popular, they made all that political crap not matter.
6 Ridiculous Sex Myths You Probably Believe
You'd think that by now we as a species would have pretty much figured out sex, what with Hollywood and the Internet constantly pumping us full of messages on the subject -- and we all know that if there are two things that can be universally trusted, those two things are Hollywood and the Internet. But as we've shown you before, your sexpertise may not be all it's engorged to be, which is why you still believe ridiculous things like ...
5 Ridiculous Lies You Believe About Ancient Civilizations
Since not all of us decided to tell our parents we'd be moving back home in four years by majoring in classics, much of what we know about ancient Greece and Rome tends to come from films and TV -- meaning that much of what we "know" originated with some Hollywood producer saying, "Yes, but can we make the togas sexier?"
For example, you probably think that ...
6 Ridiculous Myths About the Middle Ages Everyone Believes
When you think of the Middle Ages, chances are you picture gallant knights sitting astride brilliant destriers galloping through a sea of plagues, ignorance, and filth. And you can hardly be blamed for that, when everything from the movies you watch to your high school history teacher (who was mainly the football coach) has told you that ...
6 Insane Sex Myths People Used to Teach as Facts
Considering how obsessed people are with their junk, it is amazing how long it took humanity to finally figure out what it was all used for. The clitoris wasn't fully mapped until 2005, which you may recognize as being about 160 years after the general layout of the solar system had been mapped. To be fair, at least we don't treat the clitoris like a campfire ghost story, or set people on fire for having an extra nipple, or assure women that the cause for all of their ailments was a powerful need to masturbate. If you'd been born in a different time, you'd have been 100 percent invested in all three of those ideas, plus a handful of other wacky beliefs about the human underwear zone.
5 Great Movies With Mind-Blowing Symbolism You Didn't Notice
Most of the time, it's pretty easy to tell what a movie is about: Lincoln is about Lincoln. The Hangover is about some dudes who get a hangover. Tree of Life is about ... you know, things. However, sometimes a movie you've seen a million times will convince you it's about something very simple when in fact there was a hidden meaning all along that the director intentionally put there, but for some reason didn't want you to find. For instance ...
5 Mind-Blowing Facts Nobody Told You About Guns
After every mass shooting, the gun debate splits into two camps: One side says it easily could have been avoided if these maniacs weren't allowed to have guns; the other says it easily could have been avoided if each innocent victim had only gone through their daily lives in cover formation, armed like the space marines entering the giant murder womb in Aliens.
And that's pretty much the entire gun control debate, as far as the mainstream media are willing to cover. And that is a shame, because it leaves out all of the most interesting parts. Trust us, the longer you look into this, the weirder it gets. For instance ...
A 30-Second Guide to How the Gay Marriage Ruling Affects You
In case you missed it, or just saw people screaming about it on Facebook, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal government will now recognize gay marriages as legitimate (specifically, that the Defense of Marriage Act that had been preventing it was unconstitutional). BUT individual states are still free to pass their own laws.
Millions of people, most of whom are neither gay nor looking to get same-sex married, are loudly asking on the Internet how exactly this case impacts their life.
For them we have provided a handy guide:
5 Beloved Celebrities Everyone Forgets Did Terrible Things
The strange thing about celebrity scandals like the recent Paula Deen racism controversy is how inconsistent we are with our outrage. We forever remember Michael Richards for screaming racial slurs, and Charlie Sheen will always be a punchline, but the vast majority of the world has forgotten that ...
5 Classic Pop Culture Moments Actors Made Up on the Fly
We have nothing against writers (much of this very website is written by them), but we can't pretend that every iconic TV and movie character or moment is carefully crafted by expert scribes hunched over a desk. Often the writer comes up with only a vague idea (or a specific yet terrible one) and the actor has to think up something better on the spot. In fact, some of the most iconic scenes of all time come about this way ...
5 Pleasant Surprises About Famous People You Had All Wrong
We love celebrity culture for the same reason we love watching people fall down on YouTube: We like seeing dumb people screw up and make public asses of themselves. But if we stop laughing at them long enough, we'll occasionally find that celebrities are people too, and sometimes they'll surprise us by actually being way less awful than we'd suspect. For example ...
6 Movie Characters You Didn't Know Died Horrible Deaths
For the past century, cinema has delighted us with thousands of the most creative ways to die, like being simultaneously impaled through the gut and electrocuted, getting rocketed into a warehouse full of deadly fireworks, or being hit by a car and torn apart by the engine of an exploding jet, to name a few examples from Disney movies.
But for every graphic movie death that graces our screens in glorious Technicolor, there's an even more gruesome one that happens just outside of frame. Like ...
6 Ridiculous Myths You Believe About Stuff You Use Every Day
Every so often, some company really will admit that it made a terrible, terrible mistake and that one of its products causes cancer or zombies. So in a world full of recalls and class-action lawsuits, it's only natural to be wary of the health scares that show up in your email inbox. The problem is that some of the most well-known product hazards are pure bullshit.
6 Freaky Things Your Body Does (Explained by Science)
The human body is a strange and mysterious place filled with gross guts and gurgling magic potions. There are all sorts of confusing or nonsensical processes our own bodies perform that we just shrugged off and accepted way back in childhood. Fortunately, good ol' science is finally here to explain things like ...
5 Ways You're Accidentally Making Everyone Hate You
Have you recently had friends, co-workers, or strangers suddenly get pissed off at you for what seemed like no reason at all? Maybe you told yourself that they were overreacting or being too sensitive, or that they had no right to be angry when you clearly didn't mean to do whatever you did (and in fact aren't even sure what it was). If you're a socially inept type like me, I bet you've had this happen within the last month.
Well, I'm here to help. Fortunately, I am the nation's foremost expert on social missteps, with more than 30 years of experience in the field (some of you know me as the best-selling author of I Couldn't Help But Notice Your Father's Corpse Had a Boner: The Psychology of the Socially Awkward Man, MacMillan, 2008), and I have found that the answer to "Why is everyone suddenly mad at me?" is usually one of the following.
Hint: It's almost always about power.
13 Photos That Shatter Your Image of Famous People (Part 2)
On some level, you know that when your grandma was young she probably got drunk and had sex with three guys in the back of an El Camino in the parking lot of a Dairy Queen. Yet if you saw a photo of it, you'd never quite think of her the same way. Well, famous people manage their image way more carefully than your grandma, so it really freaks us out to see them as they actually are (I would know -- because of that book I wrote, I can't leave the house without my famous "penis spider" costume). Well, hang on to your asses, because ...
The 5 Parts of Sex Porn Doesn't Prepare You For
When I was in my teens, I assumed that, at some point in the hopefully near future, I would be elected sexual dynamo supreme of my county and take my rightful place as idolized cocksmith and humptastic thrustegenarian that all the ladies for several area codes would want, nay, need to get with. How I would become a sexual demigod I did not know, nor did I put a lot of thought into it. And, many, many years later when I finally did have sex for the first time, it was like eating a chocolate bar from a strange foreign country. I assumed I was prepared for and knowledgeable about what was about to take place; then I hit the bean paste center and realized nothing was as it seemed and my wealth of watching porn and HBO had done nothing to educate me. I was adrift in a sea of smells, textures, and moves I knew nothing about.
There's a good chance sex was not what you expected the first time either, or, if you haven't had it yet, it will be vastly different from what you think. In light of that, let me take off these slacks and take you on a journey through all the sexual quagmires porn can't get you ready for.
The 7 Most Preposterous Sexual Positions People Claim to Use
According to a pamphlet I found in the bathroom of the library downtown, there's a lot more going on in sex than you may have guessed. For instance, did you know you can do it different ways? And with someone else? It's quite the circus. Grab some popcorn and a clown!
In my limited sexing, I've enjoyed a few of the different fruits the Humptree has to offer, but there's a lot out there, and some of it seems like it was made up just so someone could say they did it, with little consideration for the practical and, dare I say, sensual benefits of such a maneuver. Let's take some time to go over some of the sexual repertoire that just doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense, and see if we can't figure out why.
The 7 Most Baffling Porn Trends Across the United States
In an effort to answer the burning question that nobody asked, PornHub recently released the top three most searched for words state to state in the U.S. The results have been enlightening, yet horrifying.
5 Brilliant Clues Hidden in the Background of Movies
Movie spoilers are one of the many things that the Internet deals in like currency -- once a film has been released, it's tough to avoid having the ending ruined for you unless you power down every electronic device in your home and live like a frontier fur trapper. However, sometimes the movie gives away its own ending (or at least crucial upcoming plot points) by dropping vague little hints early on. You just have to keep your eyes open ...
7 Reasons Child Stars Go Crazy (An Insider's Perspective)
When I was a kid, I acted in a few movies.
It was generally a good experience, but every day I'm glad I wasn't Olsen twins famous. Not many child stars make it out of Hollywood alive or sane, and at any given time there are at least three former ones having very public breakdowns.
But why does this happen?
The 6 Weirdest Things We've Learned Since 9/11
Hey, guys -- I'm starting to think we overreacted to the terrorism thing.
It hit me last year as I was standing in the naked airport scanner again, listening to the faint gasps and then applause from the monitoring booth, and realized that I wouldn't put up with that hassle to ward off the threat of, say, lightning. You know, like if scientists had figured out that you could reduce the already miniscule chance of being struck by merely standing outside and showing God your dick.
Anyway, that made me look back at the lessons we've learned in the 12 years since the 9/11 attacks, and I've got to say, it's not encouraging. For instance, we found out that ...
6 Insane Reasons Formerly Famous People Dropped Off the Map
With the exception of a few Hollywood lifers, most celebrities see their star power fade after a while. But despite what the "where are they now" shows would have you believe, not every Tinseltown career ends after being busted for having a cocaine-snorting contest with an aardvark. Sometimes, their lives take a somewhat unexpected turn.
OK, some more unexpected than others ...
5 Movies That Improved the Book (According to the Author)
Uh-oh. They've made your favorite book into a movie. And, of course, they've changed everything: Bill Spacechek, the courageous Polish protagonist, is now Biff SpaceChest, Aryan super-soldier. That touching scene in the garden is now an exploding cruise ship.
Hollywood seems to love books, except for everything inside of them. But sometimes, when the stars align and the directors sync up just so ... sometimes they get it right. And some other times they get it so right that even the original author has to snap his or her fingers and go "Damn, that is way better than the crap I put down."
Famous Documentaries That Were Shockingly Full of Crap
On some level, we all know that almost everything we see at the movies is bullshit, from the amount of bullets a person can take without dying to what the job of pizza delivery boy actually entails. Except documentaries. Documentaries are where we turn off the snark and open our minds to learn about distant lands, alarming realities, and how much McDonald's a dude can eat.
However, it turns out that some of the most acclaimed documentaries ever are about as real as Borat.
The Five Craziest Ways Famous Actors Got into Character
Some people might think that acting is the easiest job in the world: You get millions of dollars just to read lines that someone else wrote, and at the end of the day you get to relax in a swimming pool filled with cocaine. And that might be true, if you're a really shitty actor. But if you want to get good at it? Well, you have to be a little crazy.
Actually, probably more than a little ...
And now, Cracked's Top 15 Videos of 2013...
Why Tarantino Films Take Place in the Same Insane Universe (After Hours)
Assassinating Hitler leads directly to a world of ultraviolence and yellow tracksuits.
Quentin Tarantino is Bad at Talking to Black People (Michael Swaim)
Suddenly, we feel incredibly sorry for Samuel L. Jackson.
Sexiest Pool Party Ever (Featuring Nathan Fillion) (BriTANick)
Nathan Fillion, you guys. In a Cracked video. This is what it feels like to arrive.
The Terrible Truth 'Star Wars' Fans Can't Admit (Today's Topic)
We, uh. We took some flack for this one.
5 Horrifying Secret Rules of Life in a Movie Universe (After Hours)
Even Hollywood's brightest dreams seem like nightmares when the Cracked staff spends too much time picking at them.
The 10 Most Secretly Ridiculous Moments in Classic Movies (After Hours)
You'll never look at your favorite movies the same way again.
If Disney Cartoon Animals Were Scientifically Accurate (Cynthia Kao)
We're kind of amazed Disney's lawyers haven't come for us in the night. Yet.
If Famous Websites Were People
Yeah, best if these guys just stay inside our browsers.
25 of the Funniest 5-Second Films Ever (5 Second Films)
This is 25 times funnier than any other video you could watch.
The Mind-Blowing Hidden Meaning of 'Back to the Future' (Cody Johnston)
Minds. Blown.
14 Brilliant Movie Moments You Won't Believe Were Improvised
Hard work and careful planning have nothing on illness and improvisation.
4 Disney Movie Villains Who Were Right All Along (After Hours)
Cracked has your back, bad guys.
If Disney Cartoons Were Historically Accurate (Rachel Bloom)
There's moderately more plague and leprosy than you'd expect.
The 7 Deadly Sins of Online Gaming (Michael Swaim, Norm Scott)
How many have YOU committed? All of them. We're going to guess "all of them".
The VMA Performance Miley Cyrus Didn't Want You To See (Cody Johnston)
Yeah, we prefer this version too.
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