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Special Dispatch From Rome: How to Win the Caption Contest
Filed under: Seal Barks Tagged: Cartoon Caption Contest, cartoons, Farley Katz, O Caption! My Caption!
To understand what makes the perfect caption, you must start with the readership. Paging through The New Yorker is a lonesome withdrawal, not a group activity. The reader is isolated and introspective, probably on the train commuting to work. He suffers from urban ennui. He does not make eye contact. Laughing out loud is, in this context, an unseemly act sure to draw unwanted attention.At Emdashes, we try to soothe that periodical loneliness with cheerful camaraderie, meandering reflections, selective spelunking, and, between magazines, digital balm for the paper shakes. Won't you join us? We can't promise anything, but you may find yourself laughing a little bit louder.
Who we?
Emdashes, founded in 2004 by Emily Gordon, is a place where keen and dedicated readers of The New Yorker, past and present, can find related news and commentary: about people, subjects, and ideas within the magazine, and events and conversations outside its pages. Learn more about us and our contributors.
We welcome tips, questions, and comments about The New Yorker past and present, plus related events, links, typeface sightings, &c. To contact the magazine or send a submission, click here.
No fear: Everything you say or send is off the record unless we ask for your permission to use it.
This site is neither owned nor operated by The New Yorker magazine or Condé Nast Publications.
Some writing by Emily Gordon
- Review: A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore (for Newsday)
- Annotated slide show: a wet, festive 2009 Coney Island Mermaid Parade (for nycgo.com)
- Proposal: A better-looking MetroCard (for A Brief Message)
- Feature: Muslim immigration iconography in the Netherlands, and an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali (for Print)
- Review: Does a redesign of The New Republic mean a change of tune? (for Print)
- Interview: four online obsessives and visual cataloguers, Kate Bingaman, Nicholas Felton, Ellie Harrison, and John D. Freyer (for Print)
- Review: King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game by Paul Hoffman (for Newsday)
- Interviews: winning New Visual Artists Eleanor Grosch, Zigmunds Lapsa, Christian Cervantes, and Kate & Camilla (for Print)
- Profile: lindy hop legend Frankie Manning (for Newsday, with Robert Fouch)
- Feature: Rea Irvin, illustrator, bon vivant, and The New Yorker's first art director (for Print)
- Profile: screenwriter and novelist Joe Keenan (for Newsday)
- Review: My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World by Julian Dibbell (for Newsday)
- Review: Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley (for Newsday)
- Review: Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry (for Print)
- Report: Learning to read with comic books edited by Françoise Mouly (for Print)
- Report: The New Yorker's redesigned website (for Print)
- Interview: James Surowiecki on what's next for the wisdom of crowds (for Assignment Zero)
- Review: The Complete New Yorker (for Print)
- Interview: Matthew Diffee on the appropriately inappropriate cartoons of the The Rejection Collection (for Print)
- Interview: Roz Chast on Brooklyn, pysanky eggs, and animation (for Newsday)
- Review: books about various New Yorker cartoonists by Liza Donnelly and Iain Topliss (for Newsday)
- Review: Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life by Linda H. Davis (for Newsday)
- Interview: Edward Gorey (for Newsday)
More clips.
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They say that dashes “are particularly useful in a sentence that is long and complex.” Emdashes—like em dashes—emphasizes what’s between: in particular, between the lines, covers, and issues of a magazine close to my heart.
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Founded by Emily Gordon, edited by Martin Schneider, designed by House of Pretty, and illustrated by Inkleaf. Additional drawings by Carolita Johnson. Kissable pencil girl by Jennifer Hadley, based on a 1943 Dorothy Gray ad.
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Comments
Patrick House's caption -- "O.K. I'm at the window. To the right? Your right or my right?" -- was good, but I think even he'll admit that it wasn't as good as the one I submitted: "O.K. I'm at the window. My right or your right?" Brevity being the soul of wit, my shorter caption (which was substantively identical to the winning entry) should have been selected over Mr. House's. Why wasn't it? I can't be sure, but since I've already won two caption contests (nos. 92 and 123), I think The New Yorker is reluctant to give me a third victory. Or maybe it's because I'm Jewish. The New Yorker is a notoriously anti-Semitic publication.
I'm not gonna touch your last assertion there, Lawrence, but there have been a handful of articles about the many varieties on a single theme that come in to the caption contest. Some kind of magic software sorts the similar phrases together, and if the powers that be like a given phrase group, they choose their idea of the funniest caption therein. Humor's subjective—whaddaya gonna do?
Congratulations on your winning captions, by the way! For readers, they were "If he's so damn intelligent, let him get a job" and “You should be happy. How many husbands even notice window treatments?"
Don't worry. I don't really think The New Yorker is anti-Semitic. If anything, it's like a Jewish conspiracy, what with Remnick, Gopnik, Hertzberg, and Mankoff running the show.
And I don't mind losing to someone who submits a caption that's similar to mine. One contest winner from Berkeley submitted a caption -- "How soon can you start?"-- that was identical to mine, and I figured that was just the luck of the draw.
I responded to the news about Patrick House's article only because he tried to have it both ways. While bragging about his victory, he maintained that the captions aren't even supposed to be funny. What nonsense. Sometimes they're not funny, and sometimes The New Yorker rejects what is obviously the funniest caption because it's just too vulgar (e.g., "I can't belive I fucked a snowglobe," which I heard was submitted as a caption for the cartoon of a frustrated woman smoking a cigarette in bed while sitting next to a huge snowglobe), but most of the winning captions are pretty good.
I have to admit, it was disappointing to come so close to a third victory (and to tying the record set by that Virginian bastard, Carl Gable), but I'm going to follow Mr. House's advice and just keep trying.
Periodical loneliness? I love it.