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6 Old Products That Solved Problems We Forgot Existed
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Welcome to the Cracked newsletter!
This issue is about Norm Macdonald vs Rob Schneider, ‘Always Sunny’ plotlines that made it to real life, trivia, jokes, and much more.
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The cast and co-creators of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia insist that their characters aren’t based on themselves, but I’ve only ever heard of two people getting into a car accident while eating a bowl of cereal and both of them are Glenn Howerton.
Despite the fact that the smash hit FX comedy focuses on a group of cretinous alcoholics who, if they ever escaped into the real world, would be dead or in jail within an afternoon, the writers of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia have mined many of the iconic jokes and plotlines that made the show a cult classic from their real-life experiences or actual world events. Thankfully, none of those IRL incidents involved kidnapping an immigrant family and burning their house down, spiking a bowl of wedding milk with bath salts or sewing a naked Danny DeVito into a leather couch.
Conan O’Brien’s sidekick Andy Richter once described the late, great Norm Macdonald’s legendarily long-winded jokes as, “It’s like someone saying, ‘I gotta show you something,’ and then they take you on a four-mile hike to show you a dog turd.” Rob Schneider’s act is different — he starts and ends with turds.
This past week of social media trends has featured an explosion of praise for Conan following his chaotic Hot Ones interview, a deep dive into Macdonald’s legendary insults after the death of his old adversary O.J. Simpson and a deluge of digs on Schneider due to a Politico report that claimed that, late last year, the comic was ejected from a holiday gala for prominent Republican political figures for being too “gross and vulgar.” The comedy world has seemingly slipped into a portal back to the late 1990s with these three figures continuing to make headlines, but the real peak of their combined humor potential came during an episode of Conan in 2016, when, in front of the entire extended Adam Sandler entourage, Macdonald told a minute-long joke about Schneider’s place in the Sandlerverse chain of command.