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Mastery of Syntax Fuels Apparent "Michael Jordan of Captioners"
Filed under: Headline Shooter Tagged: David Marc Fischer, Farley Katz, Lawrence Wood, Robert Mankoff
Martin Schneider writes:
I was tickled by Steve Johnson's post at the Chicago Tribune's website on Larry Wood, who has now won the New Yorker Caption Contest for the third time.
Here are Wood's previous two victories. (Hat tip to David Marc Fischer's indispensable Blog About Town.)
Reading between the lines, it seems that economical wording is key to the Chicago attorney's success. Johnson quotes Caption Contest honcho Robert Mankoff that "Wood's was clearly the best worded of several submissions that went after the same basic joke."
Also noteworthy is the news that every week, Farley Katz, who administers the contest, "culls through the submissions, catagorizes [sic] them by type of joke." It hadn't really occurred to me that so many people would coincide on their jokes every week, but it does make sense.
Even readers with exceptional eidetic memory will probably need reminding that Wood is an Emdashes reader. Congratulations, Lawrence—or may I call you Larry?
Comments
Look, he’s won Lawyer of the Day!
Sure, you can call me Larry. And thanks for the nice write-up. It’s much more flattering than some of the comments posted on, for instance, the internet site that Emily Gordon mentions. One anonymous person, referring to my picture on the site, wrote, ““the nerd in the picture is a typical, effeminate, limp, bookish, feckless scribe. No wonder males of his kind invented in vitro fertilization: necessity is the mother of invention.†I have to admit, that’s much funnier than any of my captions.