Surely, this recent St. Lawrence University graduate, writing tutor, and native of Shoreham, VT, is the same Adam Szymkowicz who's just won the latest caption contest. (It's the one with the corporate parrot meeting.) And won it, I should add, with a caption that's as funny as the best of the entries so far. Although I'm happy to reach out to contest winners myself (hi, paranoid L.A. makeup artist! salut, charming other people!), I'm even happier when they contact me first. So, Adam, I'm looking forward to your email. I'm especially glad that his appropriately twentysomething-snappy caption—"Shut up, Bob, everyone knows your parrot's a clip-on"—is paired with a Drew Dernavich drawing, since Dernavich is one of my favorites of the younger cartoonists at the magazine. These two New Englanders might well enjoy one another, and perhaps I can arrange that in a virtual sort of way.

The cheerful-looking and Frisbee-playing Adam is a visual artist himself; at least if I'm correct about his identity, he contributed to an experimental group show called Learning to Love You More in the North Country while he was still in school. Even more impressively, he's written a caption that makes an already beautifully strange drawing even stranger. Like proper improv, a good caption like this does more than echo the immediate joke and doesn't contradict the visual setup, either, but extends it by inventing a whole new weird world and set of relationships—in ten words. This was the right choice, although Radosh's imps likely have their own preferences.

Categories: Cartoons, Contest, Dernavich