Once again, an obvious choice: “Would it kill you to use a few of your roaming minutes?” by Jennifer Cain of—hooray!—Brooklyn, N.Y. And again, I'm a little shocked at the choices here. #1 is a poor efffort, and not realistically worded either. #3 is good in that (as Bob Mankoff has emphasized) one of the best things you can do with a caption is turn the obvious assumption about the drawing's players on its head. So, here, yes, maybe the emergency-hotline woman yelling down to the bedraggled guy actually knows him. But is this the funniest thing one can think of for her to say? It's almost funny if you stretch it in your head—Doug the wretch always looks like this and this is their weird erotic ritual, perhaps—but if that's the case I'm still not amused, just sort of vaguely interested. That's not enough to win a contest. Jennifer, as far as I'm concerned, you've got it. If you win, I'll buy you a cup of coffee at the Brooklyn diner of your choice.

Categories: NYer, Cartoons, Contest