Teaching through Stupidity?

HASTAC apparently ate my last blog post, which was about a controversial study that found that games sell better when they cost less. Which sounds pretty obvious when phrased that way, but was more interesting than you might think. I'll have to try to recreate that.

That's not what I'm here to talk about, though. I'm here to talk about poop jokes. Well, kind of.

For good or for ill, I've been browsing through the archives of Cracked.com lately. Some of you may have vague memories of Cracked magazine on the grocery store magazine shelf when you were growing up. It was kind of like Mad, but without the intellectual clout. A stupider looking mascot, less famous artists (though Cracked did manage to poach Don Martin towards the end of his career), and without the storied background. Yes, Mad has a storied background. I'm a comics nerd, and I believe things like that.

Anyhow, Cracked decided to redefine itself several years ago, becoming not only a free online magazine but also not a pale shadow of another magazine. My first encounter with this new version of Cracked was at Heroes Con, a comics convention in Charlotte, NC. I think it was around 2005, and to my surprise a gentleman who had just finished reading some of my books-- I write comics, just so you know-- introduced himself as a content scout for Cracked. He thought that our mini-comic, Chocolypse Now, was amusing and that it might have a place at Cracked. Looking back, I wish I had taken him more seriously, but I remembered Cracked as a fairly lame humor magazine and the prospect of being associated with it did not beguile me. Four years later, I'm reading the magazine's archives, and to my surprise, there's something there.

Cracked's new model as a humor magazine seems to be, well, the Internet in miniature. It enjoys mocking celebrities, cable news, and particularly bad YouTube videos. It also likes highlighting things that are mindblowingly weird, and telling its readers about them. This is where things get interesting, though.

Not only are these articles engaging and funny, in a "we like to cuss a lot" kind of way. They are also very good at giving detailed explanations of scientific phenomena, complete with links to experiments verifying the phenomena they are describing. This article, for example, is about some fairly complex and strange tricks that our brains play on us on a regular basis. Tricks that allow humans to survive, but are nonetheless genuinely baffling. Other articles are historical or even entomylogical in nature, but they share some interesting things in common. Beneath a satirical and potty-mouthed veneer, these articles are actually about teaching something. They are well-researched, and they get their facts right. Almost more importantly, those facts are fascinating and often almost unbelievable. These are the kind of articles that might get kids (of all ages) trying to find out more about the fact-based world. In some ways, it's the equivalent of a substitute teacher saying "dammit" to prove to a new classroom that he's hip and cool. My suspicion, though, is that it works. And if being an episode of Nature but with swears is what it takes to learn, well, I say it's worth it.