Is That Supposed to be Funny?

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.