It’s time to take on the New
Yorker cartoon contest (and I don’t mean with alliteration). I’m certainly
not the first—or last—person to do this. When I googled “New Yorker cartoon
caption,” the second entry, under the New
Yorker website itself, was this: “Every week, the New
Yorker has a caption contest. Every week, it would be way funnier if they just
talked about sucking dick. By Nate Heller & Emily Heller.”
For example:
"I made this wall so we have a
place to hang those artsy photos we took of you sucking my dick."
On the other hand, the caption my son Max and I came up with
was this:
“I couldn’t find an iron curtain.”
Succinct, subtle, allusively political, brilliant, no? The
three finalists: “Which kid do you want?”; “I think we should stop seeing each
other?”; and “Happy anniversary!” Pedestrian, trite, unimaginative, yes?”
Film critic Roger Ebert once complained that he submitted
approximately 2,000 (or some such outrageous number) captions before one of his
was chosen. I’m sure there are many Roger Eberts out there who ask themselves,
on a weekly basis when their cartoon isn’t chosen, “What the f*#! do they want”
and “Who the f*#! chooses the winner??!!”
I was going to ask the New
York Times a similar questions last year about the couples who appear in Weddings
in the Sunday Styles section but someone else beat me to it. This is what she/he
asked the Public Editor: “How do editors select which announcements to publish,
and why don’t editors make a sustained effort to include different types of
couples?”
The editor answered that essentially those who are profiled
are the ones who manage to make their way out of the herd and end up at the
“top of their medical school class at Yale or Stanford.” I proceeded to write a
profile on my blog, Unf*#!ing
Believable, of a couple who defined a different kind of achievement, and
thoroughly enjoyed my endeavor.
I’m assuming most of us who submit these “Succinct, subtle,
allusively political, brilliant” captions think that the opposite criterion,
i.e, “in the herd,” applies to the New
Yorker contest. So I’m inviting all of you who want to express a different
kind of achievement than what gets chosen for the cartoon caption to submit your “Succinct, subtle, allusively
political, brilliant”—or whatever— caption to my blog. Send it to kmatthews1018@gmail.com and if it’s
fit to print—and funnier than “suck my dick”—I’ll post it on my blog for my
many (not!) loyal readers to enjoy.
