I used to like Cracked more than Mad, years ago. Cracked underwent some changes in 1986–were they bought by another publisher?–but the “mazagine” seemed to be all right until about six years ago. Now it competes with Mad to see which magazine can do a more thorough job of grossing out its readers! 
Have readers’ tastes really gone downhill that much?? I don’t know how many others of the Teeming Millions ever read Cracked or Mad…
Ah yes, I used to prefer Cracked to Mad, and even recall a similar mag titled Crazy (I think that was its name) The last issues that I looked at (a few months ago of mad and cracked) didn’t do much for me. I thought maybe I had matured, but perhaps that is the wrong thought…
I used to read all three (and, yes CRAZY was the title). I’ve taken a look at MAD lately and the format hasn’t changed since I last read it (about 20 years ago). Same jokes, same humor, same parodies.
Oh well…
Back in the mid-80s, I thought Cracked’s art work was brilliant, especially the stuff done by one guy named John Severin, I think. I also noticed the change in publishers at that time.
I had the impression that Crazy was a bit more hard-edged, with that crazy clown and all. Probably more “authentic” than either Mad or Cracked (whatever I mean by that).
DHR
I’ve bought some issues of Crazy (“The Magazine That Dares to Be Dumb.”) Crazy published anthologies that seemed to have a sexist content: women in underwear; boys getting erections (according to the text), and so on.
I saw one such item in Cracked, in late 1961: cheerleaders jumping so wildly they lose their panties.
And one in Mad, about 1960: A woman in an elastic one-piece swimsuit walks too close to a nail sticking out of a piling on the beach; the nail snags her suit and pulls it off! She’s cringing naked, and the swimsuit (the article was titled “Fabrics that Stretch”) is no bigger than the palm of her hand!
Just the same, I’d rather see that in any of those three magazines than gross pictures of people being brutally dismembered (one Cracked cover, drawn by Don Martin, showed a young woman with one beg bitten off by a shark!) Better some lost-one’s-swimsuit-on-the-beach jokes, or the like, than that gross stuff.
One leg bitten off–excuse me.