Since late April, The New Yorker has replaced its end-page, which had typically contained a supposedly witty essay by the likes of Steve Martin, with The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest. And I had thought Tina Brown was dragging down the intelligence of the magazine.
The only captions being accepted and awarded in the contest are those in the “New Yorker style,” a fact already lampooned by literary hipsters. That style, with a reliance on the New York Liberal urban life of business, dinner parties and strained relationships, has become as much a recognizable part of the magazine as its typeface.
As much as I hate to begrudge a fellow writer from Ohio, James Thurber, who was on the magazine’s first staff in the 1920s, contributed a lot to this aesthetic with his cartoons, the subjects of which can be summed up by one of his book titles, Men, Women, and Dogs. Yet Thurber remains a favorite cartoonist of mine because he was forever sneaking in more innovative subjects with a what the hell? flavor of humor I find tasty. I’d rank one of his New Yorker submissions in my top-five all-time favorite cartoons. It was originally published in the issue of April 6, 1935. Here it is:
I’d prefer the New Yorker to get back to including more craziness in this vein, or perhaps some Dada-inspired randomness, because that’s great, too. I recall reading about a time that a newspaper accidentally switched the captions of The Far Side and The Family Circus, vastly improving each.
And no mention of The Family Circus and captions gone awry is complete without citing The Dysfunctional Family Circus, perhaps the first popular caption contest. The DFC website allowed users to submit their own captions to The Family Circus panels that had their original captions removed. Most submissions were bad, some were insane and a few were laugh-out-loud funny, which you could never say for that cartoon’s original captions. Launched in June 1995, in its heyday, the DFC received 50,000 to 70,000 page views daily, until late 1999, when it was permanently shut down by a cease-and-desist order from King Features Syndicate. It’s one of the few websites I still recall reading regularly when I was in college. You can view a single scavenged page from the site here.
In the spirit of this, the next few posts will be dedicated to my own caption contest, using some idiot single-panel cartoons I found on a stock-art CD from 1995 and removed the actual captions from. Get to it.