Every week the New Yorker holds a contest to write a caption for one of their cartoons. I'd like to participate in this more, because it's a good creative exercise, but knowledge of its existence always seems to exit my brain. It's good that the contest is only once a week, the infrequency gives it some weight, but once I submit a caption, I have no reason to think about it for an entire week, so I don't think about it until the next time something reminds me of it. I don't even remember to check and see if I'm a finalist.
So I'm writing this post to encourage myself and make sure I remember it. I look at my blog fairly often, so if I see "Cartoon Caption Contest" near the top for a few weeks, hopefully that'll remind me it's a thing and help make it a habit.
My goal isn't to win, or even to come up with something legitimately funny (which is often impossible), it's just to submit a sensible caption that nobody else thinks of. If I rate as many of the other entries as I can, and I don't see any that used the same idea as me, then I'm the Caption King.
Considering how many people think about it for about 5 microseconds and submit the first thing that pops into their head, it's not hard to be one of the most original entries. You could be King too! We can be co-kings!
I haven't thought about it in months, but here's the comic that's being voted on this week, and the caption I would've submitted:
"Oh great, I guess now you want Shaq to sue you too."
Is this funny? Not really, but hopefully you can see what I was going for, and I haven't seen anyone else submit the same idea, so I'm calling it a win.
If you think you can't come up with anything decent, try rating some submissions. Dig through the thousands of identical jokes about carrots, eggs, rabbits having a lot of babies, Banksy, "hare" puns, Edward Hopper puns, the ways a carrot can resemble a penis, Donald Trump (for some reason) and The Last Supper. Not only are they hack, they're also bad. Many people interpret the 250 character limit as a quota, so their unfunny joke transforms into an even less funny paragraph. If you spend any amount of time actually thinking about it, you're bound to come up with something better. Will it be funny? Probably not, but very few of the winning captions are. Here's the winning caption from last week's contest:
“One can of pâté and now this.”
Not funny in any traditional sense of the word, but I understand it: "Pâté" is a French term for a shaped meat paste. This term is used for a kind of cat food that resembles the pâte that humans eat. It's somewhat fancy, so the cat grew an aggressive curly mustache, like the somewhat fancy artist Salvador Dalí. Who was Spanish, not French, but who's counting? I didn't laugh, but I see what they did there, and it was a unique idea, so that's a successful caption. That's my bar for success.
There's a new cartoon every Monday, so submissions to the current contest can be rated on April 6th and voting for the finalists will start April 13th. I probably won't post about it every week, but now that I've written about it I'll hopefully remember to keep participating, and I'll post an update if any of my captions makes it into the final round.
Let me know if you decide to join me so we can cheer each other on. You need a New Yorker account to play, but it's free, and so far they haven't spammed me or anything. What do you get if you win? Nothing, as far as I can tell. I don't think they even send you a free copy of the issue your caption appears in. But think of the prestige! You can put "joke writer for The New Yorker" on your résumé and only mostly be lying. And most importantly, I'll be proud of you 🦝