A guy I work with convinced me to enter last week’s New Yorker Caption Contest with him. For this drawing by J.C. Duffy, he developed his potential entries separately (and I never did get to see them) while I cranked out 10 off the top of my head in five minutes and passed them along to him for review.
- Bring a salad. We’re having rump roast for dinner.
- Why, yes, I would be interested in supporting a concealed firearms proposition.
- We tried spraying but every year it seems like there’s more of them.
- Believe me, it’s not all thrills and wonderment under the big top.
- Then it hit me: the bars of the cage are wide enough to walk through!
- No, I’m on a land line. Those are whip cracks, not static.
- I’m not too worried. Mortise-and-tenon joints are the strongest in woodworking.
- Just maul him? Now why didn’t I think of that?
- It’s the only exercise he gets and he could stand to lose a few pounds.
- I can’t complain. I’ve got my health.
Because the contest allows only one entry per household, our aim was to narrow the list to those most in the New Yorker style. What’s that? As Potter Stewart once said, I know it when I see it. If pressed, I would say it generally caters to a white, well-moneyed, overeducated (people who will feel a secret rush when they “get” a literary or cultural reference that would be lost or overlooked by someone like their doorman), East-Coast or New York-dwelling audience familiar with the regimen of dysfunctional-relationship cocktail-party therapist-couch middle-management desk-job existentialism. I mean, if we’re stereotyping here.
Anyhow, we agreed the most New Yorkerish were 1 and 6. Number 10 is also really New Yorkerish and I like it but my problem with it is that it’s too general and could be applied to any number of the magazine’s man-and-woman or person-and-animal one-panel bon mot cartoons.
I think 3 is funny but I suspect it’s a Far Side caption. (Let me know if you do; I can’t be bothered to look it up.) My initial favorite was 7 because I enjoy the semi-obscure specificity of mortise-and-tenon but as I step back now to consider the caption as a whole, I don’t get it. “Needs work,” a teacher would write on my paper.
The biggest problem arising from some of my ideas is that it’s unclear who in the panel the telephone conversation is referring to, especially 8 and 9.
My coworker and I agreed that, if we were gambling men, 6 would be my best bet. It’s cutesy but not as much as 1, which has a sort-of Gahan Wilson macabre-lite humor. And anyway, first-tries are never right, are they?
But the best part of this anecdote was when I completely forgot to submit my entry by the deadline of 11:59 last night, in part due to my tuxedo adventure. The guy I work with forgot, too. Ha ha! I’ll be interested to see the three finalist captions and whether they bear any resemblance to mine so I can grouse about it.