You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News

Last updated
You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News: Shocking but Utterly True Facts
You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News.jpg
Author Cracked.com
LanguageEnglish
Genre Humor, Trivia & Fun Facts
Publisher Plume (US)
Publication date
2010 (US)
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint (Hardcover & paperback & Audio [1] )
Pages320 p. (US hardcover edition)
ISBN 0452296390

You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News: Shocking but Utterly True Facts is a New York Times bestselling book from the staff of Cracked.com , which is the most visited humor website in the world. [2] [3] Published in 2010 by Plume, the book is a crowdsourced effort led by Cracked.com's editorial staff and more than 2,500 contributors from all over the world. [4]

Contents

Background

Cracked.com was founded in 2006 and currently receives over 300 million monthly page views. [5] Cracked.com publishes at least one 2,000 – 3,000 word article every day of the week, most of which are read by over a million people. [6] [7] Their longtime editorial staff includes original editor-in-chief Jack O'Brien, David Wong who was added as an associate editor later in 2006, and Oren Katzeff who became Cracked.com's General Manager in November 2007 after running business development for Yahoo Media Group. [2] [8]

The title was inspired by one of Cracked.com's most popular articles called "5 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Apocalypse Could Actually Happen". [9] [10] Michael Swaim, a Cracked writer, notes that "Cracked.com has really been built on tricking you into learning stuff and [the book] is just a very natural extension of that." [10]

Synopsis

The comedy trivia book is composed of 38 articles, including 20 of the site's most popular articles. [11] The additional 18 articles are exclusive to the book. The topics include the Zombie apocalypse, disgusting facts about bugs allowed in your food by the Food and Drug Administration, the secret menace that is dolphins, and other such facts. The book is written in Cracked.com's popular "listicle" format. [12] [13]

Reviews and reception

You Might Be a Zombie was profiled by The Huffington Post and Forbes , with an endorsement from Spider-Man and X-Men creator Stan Lee. [7] [11] [14] The book was described as "Smart, funny, and cool" by critic Roger Ebert and comedian Sarah Silverman noted that there was "finally a book that will tell you the truth about the things you need to know." [14]

The book reached #9 on The New York Times Best Seller list, #13 on The Los Angeles Times Best Seller list, and sold more than 40,000 copies. [15] [16] [17] As part of the marketing campaign, Cracked.com encouraged fans to post pictures of themselves alongside the book with 50-word captions. [8] [18]

Contributors

You Might Be a Zombie has over 2,500 contributors, [4] including:

Related Research Articles

The New York Times Best Seller list is widely considered the preeminent list of best-selling books in the United States. The New York Times Book Review has published the list weekly since October 12, 1931. In the 21st century, it has evolved into multiple lists, grouped by genre and format, including fiction and nonfiction, hardcover, paperback and electronic.

Survivalism is a social movement of individuals or groups who proactively prepare for emergencies, such as natural disasters, and other disasters causing disruption to social order caused by political or economic crises. Preparations may anticipate short-term scenarios or long-term, on scales ranging from personal adversity, to local disruption of services, to international or global catastrophe. There is no bright line dividing general emergency preparedness from prepping in the form of survivalism, but a qualitative distinction is often recognized whereby preppers/survivalists prepare especially extensively because they have higher estimations of the risk of catastrophes happening. Nonetheless, prepping can be as limited as preparing for a personal emergency, or it can be as extensive as a personal identity or collective identity with a devoted lifestyle.

<i>Forbes</i> American business magazine

Forbes is an American business magazine founded by B. C. Forbes in 1917 and owned by Hong Kong-based investment group Integrated Whale Media Investments since 2014. Its chairman and editor-in-chief is Steve Forbes, and its CEO is Mike Federle. It is based in Jersey City, New Jersey. Competitors in the national business magazine category include Fortune and Bloomberg Businessweek.

<i>Cracked</i> (magazine) American humor magazine

Cracked was an American humor magazine. Founded in 1958, Cracked proved to be the most durable of the many publications to be launched in the wake of Mad magazine.

<i>Resident Evil: Apocalypse</i> 2004 film by Alexander Witt

Resident Evil: Apocalypse is a 2004 action horror film directed by Alexander Witt and written by Paul W. S. Anderson. A direct sequel to Resident Evil (2002), it is the second installment in the Resident Evil film series, which is loosely based on the video game series of the same name. The film marks Witt's feature directorial debut; Anderson, the director of the first film, turned down the job due to other commitments, though stayed on as one of its producers. Milla Jovovich reprises her role as Alice, and is joined by Sienna Guillory as Jill Valentine and Oded Fehr as Carlos Olivera.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Seanbaby</span> American writer and video-game designer

Sean Patrick Reiley, better known as Seanbaby, is an American writer and video-game designer best known for his comedy website and frequent contributions to video game media outlets Electronic Gaming Monthly and 1UP.com, as well as the humor website Cracked.com.

wikiHow Wiki-based how-to website

wikiHow is an online wiki-style publication featuring informational articles and quizzes on a variety of topics. Founded in 2005 by Internet entrepreneur Jack Herrick, its aim is to create an extensive database of instructional content, using the wiki model of open collaboration to allow users to add, create, and modify content. It is a hybrid organization, a for-profit company run for a social mission. wikiHow uses a forked version of the free and open-source MediaWiki software; these modifications made by wikiHow were freely available to the general public via a self-serve download site from 2010 to late 2020, when wikiHow chose to discontinue the self-serve portal, citing vague "DoS attacks", as well as noting that publishing the source code is "not part of our core mission". The site's text content is released under a Creative Commons NonCommercial license.

Richard Miniter is an American investigative journalist and author whose articles have appeared in Politico, The New York Times, The Washington Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, The New Republic, National Review, PJ Media, and Reader’s Digest. A former editorial writer and columnist for The Wall Street Journal in Europe, as well as a member of the investigative reporting team of the Sunday Times of London, he is currently the National Security columnist for Forbes. He also authored three New York Times best-selling books, Losing bin Laden, Shadow War, Leading From Behind, and most recently Eyes On Target. In April 2014, Miniter was included by CSPAN's Brian Lamb in his book Sundays At Eight, as one of Lamb's top 40 book author interviews of the past 25 years for Miniter's investigative work on 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bad Hat Harry</span> American film and television production company

Bad Hat Harry Productions, Inc. is an American film and television production company founded in 1994 by director Bryan Singer. It has produced such films as The Usual Suspects and the X-Men film series, as well as the television series House. The name is an homage to Steven Spielberg and comes from a line uttered by Roy Scheider in the 1975 feature Jaws: an elderly swimmer in a bathing cap teases police chief Martin Brody about not going in the water; Brody replies, "That's some bad hat, Harry." The original 2004 logo paid animated homage to this scene. The current logo, introduced in 2011, is taken from the police lineup scene of the companies' first film,The Usual Suspects.

Bob Sellers is a Newsmax TV anchor, an executive at public relations firm MediaStars Worldwide, and the author of the book Forbes Best Business Mistakes. Sellers is a former CNBC and Fox News anchor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cracked.com</span> American entertainment website, offshoot of Cracked magazine

Cracked.com is an American website that was based on Cracked magazine. It was founded in 2005 by Jack O'Brien.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zombie</span> Undead creature from Haitian folklore

A zombie is a mythological undead corporeal revenant created through the reanimation of a corpse. In modern popular culture, zombies are most commonly found in horror genre works. The term comes from Haitian folklore, in which a zombie is a dead body reanimated through various methods, most commonly magical practices in religions like Vodou. Modern media depictions of the reanimation of the dead often do not involve magic but rather science fictional methods such as fungi, radiation, gases, diseases, plants, bacteria, viruses, etc.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zombie apocalypse</span> Subgenre of apocalyptic fiction

Zombie apocalypse is a subgenre of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction in which society collapses due to overwhelming swarms of zombies. Typically only a few individuals or small bands of human survivors are left living. In some versions, the reason the dead rise and attack humans is unknown, in others, a parasite or infection is the cause, framing events much like a plague. Some stories have every corpse zombify, regardless of the cause of death, whereas others require exposure to the infection, most commonly in the form of a bite.

<i>Pride and Prejudice and Zombies</i> 2009 parody novel by Seth Grahame-Smith

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a 2009 parody novel by Seth Grahame-Smith. It is a mashup combining Jane Austen's classic 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice with elements of modern zombie fiction, crediting Austen as co-author. It was first published in April 2009 by Quirk Books and in October 2009 a Deluxe Edition was released, containing full-color images and additional zombie scenes. The novel was adapted into a 2016 film starring Lily James and Sam Riley.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Swaim</span> American actor

Michael Swaim is an American actor, comedian, filmmaker, podcaster, and writer. While attending the University of California, San Diego, he became a columnist for the humor website Cracked.com, and after graduating from college in 2007, he joined with Abe Epperson to co-found the internet sketch comedy troupe Those Aren't Muskets. Along with Epperson and another frequent collaborator, Daniel O'Brien, he spent the late 2000s establishing a video department for Cracked. His subsequent tenure as Head of Video for the website produced several viral web series that he and O'Brien often starred in; these include the Webby Award-winning After Hours and the Streamy Award-winning Agents of Cracked.

<i>Obama Zombies</i> 2010 book written by Jason Mattera

Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation is a book written by Jason Mattera. Published in 2010 by Simon & Schuster, the book purports to reveal methods that Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign used to organize or mislead young voters.

Daniel O'Brien, also known as "DOB", is an American humorist, author, writer, actor, comedian and songwriter; formerly for Cracked.com. In August 2018, O'Brien started as a staff writer on the HBO show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and is currently a senior writer. In 2019 through 2024 he was part of the writing team that won six Emmy Awards for Outstanding Writing on a Variety Series.

Jason Keith Pargin is an American humor writer and novelist who formerly wrote under the name David Wong. He is the former executive editor of humor website Cracked.com.

Cracked After Hours is a comedy web series hosted on the website Cracked.com and produced by Cracked and its then-parent company The E. W. Scripps Company.

<i>The Last Kids on Earth</i> (TV series) Childrens animation streaming television series

The Last Kids on Earth is a children's animated television series, based on the book series of the same name by Max Brallier, that premiered on Book 1 Netflix on September 17, 2019 with a one-hour first season. A ten-episode second season, or "Book 2", Official TV episodes on 2019 titled The Last Kids on Earth and the Zombie Parade, premiered on April 17, 2020. The third season also known as "Book 3", was released on October 16, 2020 which ended the series on a cliffhanger. An interactive special, subtitled Happy Apocalypse to You, was released on April 6, 2021.

References

  1. Cracked.com; Heller, Johnny (2014). You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News: Shocking but Utterly True Facts. Cracked.com.
  2. 1 2 Kung, Michelle. Cracked.com Grows Up. Wall Street Journal. August 1, 2011.
  3. Demand Media Wins Two People's Voice Webby Awards. Sun Herald. May 1, 2012.
  4. 1 2 Cracked Writers' Room: Jack O’Brien Describes How to Crowdsource Laughs [usurped] . Crowdsourcing.org.
  5. Osburn, Paige. The (prat)fall of Cracked Magazine-- and the rise of Cracked.com. 89.3 KPCC. April 12, 2012.
  6. Tricking People into Reading Again. SXSW.
  7. 1 2 Humphrey, Michael. Cracked Writers' Room: Jack O'Brien Describes How To Crowdsource Laughs. Forbes. October 19, 2011.
  8. 1 2 Weinroth, Adam. Interview with a Zombie: Oren Katzeff of Cracked.com. Demand Media. December 28, 2010.
  9. Wong, David and TE Sloth. 5 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Apocalypse Could Actually Happen. Cracked.com. October 29, 2007.
  10. 1 2 Nunziata, Nick. Interview: Michael Swaim & Daniel O'Brien (You Might Be A Zombie). Chud. January 7, 2011.
  11. 1 2 O'Brien, Jack. Cracked.com: 'You Might Be A Zombie,' And 7 Other Pieces Of Bad News (PHOTOS). Huffington Post. February 10, 2011.
  12. Weigel, David. Five Ways to Spot a Bogus Story. Slate. May 1, 2012.
  13. Krangel, Eric. Cracked.com Taunts Ailing MAD Mag: Ever Hear Of The Internet? Business Insider. February 1, 2009.
  14. 1 2 Cracked.com’s New Book Named ‘Best Seller’ by The New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Demand Media. January 20, 2011.
  15. Holiday, Ryan. How Comedian Daniel O'Brien Turned One Joke Into A Major Book Deal. Forbes. April 16, 2012.
  16. Schuessler, Jennifer. "Hardcover". The New York Times.
  17. You Might Be a Zombie. The Los Angeles Times. January 16, 2011.
  18. Shields, Mike. Demand Media’s Unlikely Success Story. Digiday . October 14, 2011.