How About Never--Is Never Good for You?: My Life in Cartoons

by Mankoff, Bob

  “Obama has the potential to get a whole new generation disillusioned.”

  But their primary targets are the self-centered dissatisfactions of our own well-off, well-educated readers, who have comparatively little to complain about but nevertheless, sometimes, turn that little into a lot.

  “Excuse me—I think there’s something wrong with this in a tiny way that no one other than me would ever be able to pinpoint.”

  These kinds of cartoons aren’t necessarily the gag funniest, but they are, to me, the most New Yorker magazine–ish of all New Yorker cartoons. They’re not making fun of the less fortunate, and they’ve not faux rebellious, speaking “truth” to power. Rather, they ridicule their own class—maybe, just maybe, producing some skepticism about its unconsciously held assumptions, and, if not an out-and-out laugh, then at least an out-and-out wry smile of recognition.

  For one kind of cartoon, we chuck such nuanced criteria out the window. That’s the one we do each week just for you and you, and all the rest of you who, the moment you get your New Yorker, rush to the back page, where you see this:

  Caption contest cartoons are also selected at the Wednesday afternoon meeting. Cartoonists submit either specifically for the caption contest or for our regular pages. In the latter case, if we think a cartoon is right for the caption contest but not quite right for the magazine, we remove the caption for the contest. Either way, not just any cartoon image will work.

  Here are two basic types of captioned New Yorker cartoons. In the first type, the joke is primarily located in the caption, and the image just provides the setting. The boardroom cliché is a good example.

  “And, while there’s no reason yet to panic, I think it only prudent that we make preparations to panic.”

  In the second, there is something unusual about the image that needs to be made sense of by the caption.

  “Damn it, Hopkins, didn’t you get yesterday’s memo?”

  In the parlance of humor theory, an incongruity calls for resolution by the right caption. So, for an image like the next one to work as a caption contest, the cartoonist, Drew Dernavich,

  had to introduce an incongruous element.

  “Shut up, Bob, everyone knows your parrot’s a clip-on.”

  Then the right caption—“Shut up, Bob, everyone knows your parrot’s a clip-on”—can glue together the two different frames of reference. So, how do you come up with the right caption and win the contest? All will be revealed in the next chapter.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  HOW TO “WIN” THE NEW YORKER CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST

  Hey, what’s with the quotation marks around “win”? Hey, they’re ironic in two senses of the word. First, in the traditional sense of something ironic meaning the opposite of what is said, so partly what I’m going to show you is how to lose the contest; by doing the opposite, you can improve your captions. Second, in the sense of distancing myself from the over-the-top claim I made in the last chapter in order to have you chomping at the bit to read this one. So stop your chomping. Actually, I just found out from Google that it’s not chomping, it’s champing. Anyway, stop that, too.

  But don’t be too disappointed. Remember, it’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the game (Russian roulette excepted), and I am going to tell you how to play this game better. That will not necessarily make you win, but it will increase your odds and, at the very least, make it more fun for all of you who do the captions and all of us who have to read them.

  Now, I don’t want to get ahead of myself here. I can’t just assume everyone knows all about the New Yorker caption contest. So let me slow down, catch up with myself, and get everyone on the same page. By the way, if you’re on any other page than this one, please come back.

  Okay. How does the contest work? Well, for one thing it doesn’t work as it used to, and a good thing, too. For its first six years of existence, from 1999 through 2004, it was a once-a-year affair on the back page of our annual Cartoon Issue. Here’s that first one, from November 1999. The winning caption was “Mom, Dad’s been on eBay again!” Very 1999.

  It took us more than two months to sort through all the thousands of mail and e-mail submissions to select the winner and honorable mentions. And then, in publishing the results, we felt obligated to fill the back page more with our text than the contestants’. Whose contest was this, anyway?

  The yearly contest was popular with our readers but had no wider cultural influence. All that changed in 2005, when David Remnick suggested that we make it a weekly feature. What a brilliant idea. I wish I’d thought of it, and as the years pass and memory fades, I’m sure I will have. Still, putting brilliance aside (which is easy to do if it isn’t yours), the suggestion staggered the staff because it didn’t seem feasible. If the contest appeared on Monday with the deadline for entries being Sunday at midnight, it would be impossible to publish the winner the next Monday. However, it turned out that a staggering suggestion could be neatly handled by a staggered contest system. Accordingly, on the back page of every issue since 2005 have appeared three contests in various stages: a contest to enter, a contest to vote on, and a contest whose winner is being announced. Here is the first iteration of that format from 2005:

  Since then there have been more than four hundred reiterations and more than two million entries. And I only expect the contest’s popularity to grow now that it’s available on phones and tablets. But I’ll be the first to admit that the whole toaster-oven initiative was ill-conceived.

  That fiasco notwithstanding, the contest has become part of the cultural landscape. It’s been ripped off

  and riffed on.

  “Why girls from Stockholm be so fresh????!!!!”

  There’s even been an anti–caption contest, started by writer Daniel Radosh, where the goal is to come up with a caption that, as Radosh puts it, “is not just unfunny, but so aggressively unfunny as to make you cringe.” Example:

  “Don’t make a sound. You mustn’t let the others know I’m asking you this. By any chance do you know anything about gyroscopic inertial guidance systems? Just nod once for ‘yes’ and then point to it.”

  Okay, I’m cringing. Definitely funny in its own way, but I prefer our way and our caption for this image, which was “I’m not a rocket scientist, I’m a brain surgeon.”

  The above are all ingenious examples of meta-humor. The primary joke in all of them is that there is no real joke. The secondary joke is making fun of humor itself and New Yorker cartoon humor in particular. I have no problem with that either, really, honestly, sincerely, he said, protesting too much. But meta isn’t necessarily betta, so let’s get back to the real thing.

  From soup to nuts, the cartoon caption contest is a five-week process that begins when a cartoon first appears on the back page of the magazine, challenging readers to caption it and driving many of them nuts in the process. This frustration was nicely captured in an episode of Bored to Death where George, the character played by Ted Danson, struggles to win the contest.

  Jonathan Ames, the creator of Bored to Death, said, “I wrote it into the show because I’ve failed at the caption contest myself a number of times.” He’s not alone among stymied stars, as a Wall Street Journal article entitled, ahem, “How About Never—Is Never Good for You? Celebrities Struggle to Write Winning Captions” indicates. Indeed, the contest has become infamous for frustrating famous people, from Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who confessed that no matter how hard he works at it, nothing comes to mind, to Maureen Dowd, who said she gave up after trying it every week for a year, to Zach Galifianakis, who was so miffed after being rejected that he refused to comment for the Journal article. Recently Stephen Colbert, in mock pique, said, “I try hard not to read the New Yorker because I never win their cartoon caption contest.”

  So, what’s stopping all of them from winning? Actually, who’s stopping them would be more like it. First there’s this fellow, my assistant, Marc Philippe Eskenazi, known as Marc Philippe Eskenaz for short
. He’s the first line of defense against the onslaught of the thousands of captions that come in each week.

  His job is to go through every single one of them,

  which is exhausting. But at this point he can do it in his sleep, and often does.

  We make it easier on him by supplying periodic LOLCat breaks to revive him.

  As well as a computer program to weed out captions that are too long or too common.

  After that, we rely on his own sense of humor, which he has honed at The Harvard Lampoon and by doing stand-up gigs around New York,

  to make a short list of fifty or so of the best captions, broken down into categories representing the different comic themes each contest evokes.

  With that, Marc’s work is done. He can now return to perfecting his stand-up routine or continue on his quest for the ideal caption contest theme song.

  Next up in the selection process is moi. I aim to select three good captions that will be competitive with one another when it comes time for the public to vote. Experience has taught me that, licensed humorist though I am, when I tried to do this just by myself I wasn’t very good at it and was, in fact, in danger of getting my license revoked.

  I’ve had better success by picking about ten captions I like best and then sending a survey to New Yorker editors and staff members to see which three they like best.

  With this method, I often get what I’m looking for: an equable distribution of the voting in the actual contest.

  Were these actually the three best captions from this contest? Probably not, if yours wasn’t selected. But at least you now know the madness behind the method.

  Let’s move on to the methods you can use—mad, sane, or a combo of the two—to increase your chances of winning.

  Okay, first we’ll go wonky, rational, statistical on this. Obviously, like they say about the lottery, “You’ve got to be in it to win it.” You can’t get selected if you don’t enter.

  Furthermore, entering more often does help. It’s simple math, provided that you think this equation is simple:

  X=1-(4999/5000)^N

  Where X = your odds of winning at least once and N = the number of entries. (There are, on average, five thousand entries per contest.)

  This chart will make it clearer, or at least marginally less wonky:

  Incidentally, that five hundredth contest will occur in 2015, and the thousandth in 2026. Even at that late date, your odds of winning a single contest have increased to only 20 percent, assuming you’ve entered all one thousand contests. And your odds don’t become even until the 3370th contest, in 2076, provided you have remained incredibly persistent and, of course, alive.

  By the way, contrary to conventional wisdom, your odds will also be better if you’re a woman. While some sociological research, using college students as subjects, showed that men were marginally better at generating funny captions than women, our contest swings in the other direction. Yes, guys do enter more frequently; 84 percent of all entrants are men. But only 77 percent of the winners are. For women, the figures are 16 and 23 percent.

  While entering more often would help in an actual lottery, this is actually not a lottery, where everyone who enters has an equal chance, because in this contest all the captions are not equally funny. In fact, most of them are not funny at all. Here’s a random sample of ten entries from contest No. 281:

  1. This definitely isn’t the quickest way from A to B.

  2. Do you have the keys?

  3. These Super Walmarts are getting to become a bit ridiculous.

  4. Next time just pay the three bucks to the valet.

  5. I told you we didn’t park here.

  6. Think we’re “f-ing” lost?

  7. I told you—we were in A, for “Amusing.”

  8. Do we even own a car?

  9. That word I’m thinking of—starts with F and ends with “you.”

  10. So, Mr. Time Traveler, it looks like the future isn’t what it used to be.

  Nos. 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and 10 are just plain bad—what, around the office, we affectionately call “craptions.” No. 7 is self-referential, so also no good. No. 4 is okay but was submitted by hundreds of entrants so therefore gets downgraded. No. 6 and 9 expressed the same basic idea that the winning captions did but didn’t express it as well.

  “I’m not going to say the word I’m thinking of.”

  Interestingly, the late Roger Ebert, the famous film critic, submitted the winning caption for this contest. He’s the only celebrity ever to have won the contest. Is that because he’s funnier than Maureen Dowd, Zach Galifianakis, or Jonathan Ames? Probably not—he was just more persistent. While Maureen Dowd claimed in that Wall Street Journal article to have entered practically every week for a year, our database indicates that she entered only three times. Jon Ames? Also just three. And Galifianakis, a measly two.

  Ebert, on the other hand, won on his 107th try. He didn’t win again, though he entered every week right up to the week before he passed away. Had he lived, I would have laid even money that he would eventually win again. Why? Not because of the statistics of entering more—that’s marginal—but because there’s a nonstatistical benefit to entering more. Simply put, the more you do something, provided you have some talent for that something, the better you get at it. In 2009, the creativity researcher Keith Sawyer interviewed a number of caption contest winners and found that not only did they enter a lot of contests but they usually generated lots of captions for each contest, from which they selected the best. Quantity doesn’t necessarily result in quality, but it does more often than paucity does. It’s the Malcolm Gladwell ten-thousand-hours thing, although if you’ve spent ten thousand hours on our caption contest, you might want to reevaluate your priorities.

  The caption contest Ebert won attracted a lot of attention, including the notice of Peter McGraw, a consumer psychologist who teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder, and Phil Fernbach, a Brown University cognitive scientist. They set out to crack the code underlying our caption contest by analyzing all 5,971 submissions to caption contest No. 281. They concluded that we favor captions that are short, novel, don’t restate what is already in the image, and don’t use too much punctuation, especially exclamation points.

  I agreed that long-winded, hackneyed, redundant, overpunctuated captions have little appeal and that shouting a joke doesn’t make it any funnier, except to someone hard of hearing. Still, these are reasonable guidelines, and they will help you avoid terrible captions like this one:

  When we reached D and we ran out of gas, you said, “Don’t worry.” When we reached E, you said, “Don’t worry.” What do you have to say for yourself at F? And keep it clean!

  One thing I will grant that caption is that it is novel. But, as I’ve mentioned before, novelty in humor is overrated. The humor we like best hits the sweet spot between familiarity and originality, gratifying us because when we hear the punch line, we say, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  Like in contest No. 147:

  Here is the setup, followed by blanks representing the three-word punch line.

  “Objection, Your Honor! _______ _______ _______.”

  Can you guess it? Right there on the tip of your tongue, isn’t it: “Alleged killer whale.” Why didn’t you think of that? Actually, many basically did, with the variants such as:

  “Objection, Your Honor! The prosecution must refer to my client as the alleged killer whale!”

  “Objection, Your Honor—the prosecuting attorney should refer to my client as an ‘alleged killer whale.’”

  “Objection, Your Honor. My client is an ‘alleged’ killer whale.”

  The winner, on the other hand, used just the right number of words to make the joke but not one word more. Also, for this contest, the attorney’s exclamation point is completely apt.

  Satisfied now that you can go win this thing? I doubt it. All I’ve told you, while valid enough as far as it goes, doesn’t go far enough. With these rules, you�
��re in the ballpark but not anywhere near home plate. They’re more about what not to do than what to do, so here, at last, is my to-do list.

  1. VERBALIZE. Quality of captions emerges from quantity of captions. Look at the picture and say or write down all the words or phrases that pop into your mind, without censoring them, and then free-associate to those words and phrases. Here’s my stream of consciousness on this: duck, goose, honk, Donald Duck, the Donald, duck soup, avoid, evade, chicken, coward, Chicken Little, chicken big, eggs, chicken and egg, free-range chicken, chicken crosses road, chicks, pets, petting, sex, children, marriage, mixed marriage, birds, birdbrain, birds of a feather, feather in your cap, bird flu, bird flew, cock a doodle do, cock a doodle don’t, cock crow, morning, migrate, migraine.

  From these associations, it will be fairly easy to come up with some captions. For instance: “Whoa, Chicken Little all grown up.” “I liked you better when you weren’t free-range.” “I’ll bet you say that to all the chicks.” “I bet you think you’re going to crow about this in the morning.” “But how will we raise the children?” “Who you callin’ chicken?” “Okay, now get the hell back across the road.” “Not tonight, I have a migraine headache.” “For the last time, we are not birds of a feather.” “Just so you know, my safe word is ‘quack.’” “I didn’t say ‘quick,’ I said ‘quack.’” “Quack means quack.” “Look, I told you I don’t care about the sky falling as long as the earth moves.” “What if the Donald finds out?”