My caption
“I'm trying to to stop doomscrolling, would you mind switching it to the moon?”
A million obvious jokes about gym etiquette, form critique, and sexual harassment immediately came to mind. After rejecting those, I started thinking about why the man might be there. What led to this situation? Assuming this is just part of the normal gym-going experience, why might the woman be annoyed with him?
One common annoyance in shared public spaces is the presence of TVs. I've often wished I was the kind of person willing to obtain and use a TV-B-Gone so I could bring a little peace to restaurants and waiting rooms with blaring televisions. I've never really been to a gym (physical exertion for its own sake makes me depressed) but I imagine it might also be the kind of place that has TVs on the wall.
Public TVs are often tuned to the news, that having been judged the least offensive and most universally tolerable programming. This seems like it'd be especially annoying in a gym, where one might want to forget about the problems of the world for an hour or two.
In my caption, the man is filling the role of the TV. Gyms hire these guys to spin a globe for whatever reason businesses have TVs. The woman, making an effort to be less "plugged-in", is annoyed by this. She comes to the gym to get away from current events, and she can't even look at a globe of the world without thinking about how fucked it is. The horizontal spinning of the globe resembles the "endless scroll" of the media apps she's trying to stop using. So, she makes a polite request: if you must spin a globe, could you at least switch it to a more neutral planet, like the moon?
What could I have done better?1
Maybe gyms don't usually have TVs; it's totally possible gym owners show restraint for the same reasons I thought TVs in a gym would be annoying. If so, good on them. If I had thought about it longer, maybe I would have had an idea that doesn't rely on a maybe-incorrect assumption.
Maybe people didn't make the connection between the endless spinning of the globe and the endless scroll of the news feed. Fair, it is kind of a reach. Maybe there was a more logical way I could've expressed "I don't want to think about the world right now".
There's nothing in the illustration to suggest that he's spinning the globe, but in mythology, Atlas is the guy literally holding up the world we all live on, so I always thought he must be slowly spinning it or else we wouldn't have day and night. But Atlas might not have ever been depicted spinning the globe, so maybe this assumption only exists in my brain.
Verdict
Anyway, I didn't see any captions even close to mine during the rating phase, so I'm calling this another win. 2-for-2!
The finalists
Finalist 1
“I know a guy who’ll take Greenland off your hands if that helps.”
Help in what way? Reducing his burden? Trump annexing Greenland wouldn't literally remove it from the Earth, any more than any of the other countries the US has already invaded. Are we supposed to understand the annexation as an inherent improvement to the planet? Was this caption voted up by a secret MAGA contingent? I don't get it.2
Finalist 2
“That’s what you get for trying to cancel your membership.”
This one's good. It's the one I voted for. Gym membership cancellation is notoriously onerous. This caption conveys that idea quite snappily.
Finalist 3
“Are you sweating or is that just the ice caps melting?”
There's no sweat or other liquid depicted in the cartoon. But even if we use our imaginations, would we assume water from the globe had leaked out onto the man? If so, why would the person think melting ice caps is the source, and not the already-liquid water covering 70% of the globe? That seems like a much more likely source of leakage. Is that the joke? It's funny that the person didn't notice the large obvious body of water? I'm not getting that from the language used, but I'm not seeing any other possible angle. Edit: I zoomed in and I can see that there are subtle sweat drops on the man's chest and head. The caption still doesn't make sense: the way he's holding the earth, any antarctic icemelt would be dripping onto his back.
Contest #984 winner
“The tortoise finished last week.”
This is one of dozens of nearly identical "tortoise and the hare" jokes. They might as well have pulled the winner out of a hat. I'm not trying to make a joke about stage magic, but if I was, it might be more clever than this caption. See you next time 🦝
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Let's assume the "black box" problem I wrote about last time means even the objectively funniest caption has no greater chance of winning; it's still worth critiquing my own work for personal growth and satisfaction. ↩
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On reflection, maybe the joke is: Trump is so desperate for a win that he would take the model of Greenland off this model of the Earth just to be able to say he "took Greenland". That would make the planet lighter, which would help the man, and it makes Trump look stupid and insecure. I don't think about Trump enough to have this caricature of him in my head, but for people who do, I can see why this might've tickled them. ↩