Making his mock

NEW YORK -- Monty Sarhan can dish it out, but he can't take it.

The 33-year-old Braintree native has been working day and night to re launch the venerable humor magazine Cracked, but for some reason he is obsessing about a wire service dispatch that called him ``pudgy." ``I don't think I'm pudgy," are his first words to a visiting reporter. ``Please don't put that in your story. I'm not pudgy."

This from a man whose first issue features a PhotoShopped cover picture of Tom Cruise, mocking the ``44-Year-Old Virgin." From a man who ran a feature titled ``Vehicular Homicide Is the New Black," illustrated with photos of Laura Bush and Matthew Broderick, among others. For the record, Sarhan is stocky, hefty, thickly built, and, yes, pudgy.

His excellent Cracked adventure is a long-shot gamble on a magazine that has seen better days. The 48-year-old Cracked has always been the Avis Rent a Car of the humor magazine business, the C-student's second read after Mad. ``Humor magazines are an extremely difficult category to crack," says University of Mississippi magazine expert Samir Husni . ``From National Lampoon to Mad to Cracked to Spy, they start with edgy political humor, then slowly but surely they turn to boring political humor, and then it's sex and blondes. They start with a blast, and they die with a blast. The odds are against them from Day One."

Sarhan certainly has the will, and the background, to succeed. In grade school, he was sending jokes to David Letterman's show; they didn't use them, but he did get a glossy photo of Dave. Voted Most Likely to Succeed by his high school class , he also placed second in the ballot ing for Class Clown. As a Tufts University undergraduate, Sarhan made occasional appearances at the Comedy Connection in Faneuil Hall. ``It was quite an adrenaline rush to get up in front of the audience," he recalls.

After Tufts, Sarhan saw himself writing sketches for ``Saturday Night Live." But his Egyptian mother and father, a doctor at the Lahey Clinic, had other plans: ``I was a child of immigrants -- they insisted I finish my education." So he packed off to Duke Law School, to get the degree and bust out. ``Everyone who goes to law school says they're going to get out of the law," Sarhan notes. ``I actually did."

Sarhan put in three years at the bar, at the Manhattan law firm of White & Case , where he learned the rudiments of doing deals. He left to start working on his own deals, including a cellphone venture in Iraq and a yearlong, futile quest to buy RKO Pictures. A friend happened to mention that Cracked was for sale. Sarhan's reaction? ``I said, `Cracked? Nobody reads them any more.' I was a film guy; I didn't want to do stuff for kids."

He wasn't the only one underwhelmed by the deal. ``I can't tell you how much I tried to keep him from doing this," says Larry Durocher , a magazine consultant in New London, N.H., who has published memorable satires of The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. ``My first reaction was, `If someone gave me a million dollars to invest in Cracked magazine, I would suggest giving it back.' "

But Sarhan ``couldn't get Cracked out of my head," he reports. ``I had dismissed it out of hand as just a comics magazine, with maybe a very limited play for their archives. Then I started thinking about its potential. It's got huge brand equity among 18- to 34-year-olds, and that's the demographic that everyone wants to sell to."

When he was kicking the tires in early 2005, Cracked, previously owned by supermarket tabloid publisher American Media Inc., was a dead brand walking. The once-monthly magazine was appearing only six times a year. The circulation, which reached 1 million in the early 1970s, was fluctuating between 20,000 and 50,000. Sarhan won't say how much he and his investors paid, but he will say that their investment of less than $10 million should keep the magazine and the website cracked.com running for three to five years.

The moment he bought the magazine, he fired the remaining three editors, shut it down for 18 months, and then hired four new staffers for the magazine and website, which runs its own original material. The core staff is essentially the Georgetown University college humor magazine, The Georgetown Heckler , moved 200 miles to the north, plus a Canadian, editor Jay Pinkerton , for comic credibility. (One of the Georgetown spawn is Jack O'Brien , son of former Celtics coach Jim O'Brien .) Better-known names such as McSweeney's alumnus Neal Pollack and VH-1's Michael Ian Black have signed on as contributors.

For the moment, there are no ad salesmen, which hardly matters, because there are no ads. (Mad started accepting ads only in 2001.) ``We're not projecting any significant revenues until next year," Sarhan says. He's put 100,000 copies of the first issue, which sells for $3.99, on newsstands everywhere, as the saying goes. If he sells one out of three -- the normal ratio for newsstand sales -- he would be happy. He hopes to increase the publication frequency from six to 12 times a year.

The old Cracked was best known for its wacky comics. Sarhan's Cracked is a three-legged stool: some comics, some humor and parody, and a ``But Seriously" section that interviews comedy stars like Rob Corddry of ``The Daily Show" or the creators of ``South Park." While closing on the deal for Cracked, Sarhan says he woke up one night and jotted down three titles: National Lampoon, Spy, and Rolling Stone. ``I knew I wanted to cover comedy the way Rolling Stone covers music," he explains. ``I want to become the definitive voice on the subject."

In October of last year, Sarhan and his crew started posting humor on the website, which he says now draws as many as 70,000 visitors a day. Like many a modern media entrepreneur, Sarhan says he's in the ``content development business," not the magazine game. ``We want to be ubiquitous," he says. ``We want to be on cellphones, we want to be on the Internet, and we want to be on the newsstands." He is likewise eager to pitch Cracked projects to Hollywood: ``I see Cracked as a way for me to start making movies."

Is ``Cracked" funny? Some bits will strike some people as funny, and some bits will not. The first issue has a not-half-bad parody of ESPN: The Magazine, although we are talking about a publication that flirts with self-parody every time it appears on the newsstands. (A recent cover: ``Josh Beckett Couldn't Be Happier.") The ``Periodic Table of the '80s" is funny, as is a fake ad for the ``Britney Xpress" card, featuring a proto-literate Kevin Federline.

Reviewing the magazine, Chris Mohney of gawker.com wasn't blown away by the comedy coverage: ``Though some of the quotes are amusing, none of these articles offer much in the way of novelty or bite (beyond sound bites). It's like reading a special comedy-focused issue of Entertainment Weekly."

So what's the punch line? Will Cracked Part Deux survive? The initially skeptical Durocher, who has become a consultant to the venture, thinks Sarhan has a shot: ``He's taken what was in his mind's eye and put it on the page. He's got three or four issues blocked out, and if they get favorable attention, he will have a receptive audience of advertisers he can appeal to. Then he can raise more money for a subscription campaign and have some chance of success."

Barry Rosenbloom , who was Cracked's publisher in the 1990s, notes that every competitor to Mad -- such long-forgotten titles as Sick and Crazy -- bit the dust. Except Cracked. ``There's a lot of money to be made being Us Weekly to People," Rosenbloom says. ``[Sarhan] seems to be hiring decent people, people who know funny as a business as opposed to people who think they are funny cracking jokes over beers.

``Humor is a really tough business," Rosenbloom adds. ``You try making an 18-year-old laugh. Believe me, it's not easy."

Alex Beam's e-mail address is beam@globe.com.