I promised I'd address the cartoon caption contest, inaugurated in the April 25th issue. My own first reaction was to write below the drawing, "The artists seem nervous about this new marketing scheme, Mr. Mankoff." My mother, as usual, was more thoughtful. She writes:

I love Mike Twohy's lab rat cartoons—especially the Dr. Henderson one ("When Dr. Henderson comes in, everybody play dead"). I'm trying to think of a caption, without much luck. So, we have the clipboard guy in the fuzzy rat suit, glasses and street shoes, taking notes and reporting to the lab-coat guy, who appears to be nonplussed. Some of the rats are paying attention, but most are wandering around in their cages.

The only caption I can think of is something like "Participant Observation, Perkins. It all comes down to Participant Observation." Pretty lame, I realize, but it does call to mind my neophyte anthropology fieldwork days, and the (temporary and misplaced) illusion that I was following guidelines, "fitting into the community" and being something other than a blatant outsider—inevitably creating data perforce to suit my thesis, rather than recording or observing anything genuine, which was elusive and would have taken far more time.

"Participant observation" is probably long gone from the ethnography lexicon now, but as late as the 1960's the term was still seriously bandied about. The concept was important to the funding of Margaret Mead's Samoan fieldwork—idea being that as a woman she could find out all kinds of things that the male researchers had only limited or formal access to.

How naive and simplistic it all sounds now. Why would the Samoan (and later the Balinese) women confide in Mead, a white woman and an outsider, suspiciously unmarried, and transient? Similarly, why would the men open their hearts to the tall, somewhat eccentric safari-clad New Zealander Reo Fortune? Researchers like Gregory Bateson and Claude Levi-Strauss had a clearer task: looking into linguistics and local economics and the broad dynamics of social structure. Religion: always more murky.

Back to the lab rats; I look forward to seeing what the winning caption is. But what the heck, I'm writing my personal version on the drawing for posting on my refrigerator. Whatever, the rats with their whiskers and pointy noses are wonderful.

By the way, it's going to be hard to outdo Twohy in the caption department. If you scan all of his stuff in the Cartoon Bank, you may be surprised to see what a high percentage of really hilarious captions there are. The current issue's blank cartoon looks like good material for the right writer, though, so I'll be my optimistic self (I find that even as I become more pessimistic, I seem to remain an optimist almost despite myself) and say good luck to them all, and I'm eager to see the results.

Q. & A.: Your Caption Here [New Yorker; Mankoff explains the contest, its challenges, and its origins. "Now, if instead of the receiver he had a banana in his hand—"]
"I don’t usually volunteer for experiments, but I’m kind of a puzzle freak." [Twohy, Cartoon Bank]
"Five thousand hours, and his vital signs are still strong.” [Twohy, Cartoon Bank]