{"id":23743,"date":"2020-10-21T15:05:52","date_gmt":"2020-10-21T19:05:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/?p=23743"},"modified":"2023-10-11T21:39:33","modified_gmt":"2023-10-12T01:39:33","slug":"cartooning-101-vs-the-new-yorker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/2020\/10\/cartooning-101-vs-the-new-yorker\/","title":{"rendered":"Cartooning 101 vs The New Yorker"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New Yorker<\/em> weekly magazine, long renowned for its single-panel cartoons, features a\u00a0 cartoon caption contest<\/a> in its online edition.\u00a0 The premise sounds like fun — but this being the notoriously fussy New Yorker<\/em>, the simple task of crowning a weekly contest-winner is a month-long ordeal:<\/p>\n

Week 1:\u00a0 Readers are shown an un-captioned cartoon drawn by a New Yorker<\/em> contributor.\u00a0 They are given seven days to submit the most outrageously funny caption known to man, or at least to themselves after a glass or two of Bordeaux.<\/p>\n

Week 2:\u00a0 The cartoon is reprinted and various submitted captions — possibly randomly selected, but preferably randomly curated<\/em> — are presented.\u00a0 Readers may register their opinions of these captions, each in turn, by clicking UNFUNNY<\/span>, SOMEWHAT FUNNY<\/span>, or FUNNY.\u00a0 <\/span>(Be assured, UNFUNNY<\/span> is the button one’s finger will hover over.)\u00a0 Exactly what happens to these votes is not entirely clear.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Week 3:\u00a0 Unlucky New Yorker<\/em> staff members and interns are tasked with reviewing all the submitted captions and picking three finalists, according to some unpublished criteria.<\/p>\n

Week 4:\u00a0 The cartoon and its three finalist captions are presented to New Yorker<\/em> readers so that they may vote on the winner.<\/p>\n

Week 5:\u00a0 The cartoon, the winning caption, and the runners-up — as determined by the previous week’s votes — are printed on the New Yorker<\/em>‘s cartoon caption contest page.<\/p>\n

Now, submitting a caption and then being forced to wait weeks to find out if yours is even a finalist… this is buzz-kill enough in the internet instant-gratification era.\u00a0 But I haven’t even touched on one’s (slim) chances of winning the New Yorker<\/em>‘s caption contest without knowing the secret sauce.\u00a0 From what I can tell, a winning caption must first and foremost pay homage to the quirky concerns of upscale New York City residents.\u00a0 That is the ticket that gets you in the door.\u00a0 But you would be mistaken if you think your entry will score higher if it adheres to time-honored cartoon conventions — in fact, you may be ill-served by that approach.\u00a0 Here are a couple of examples of what I mean.<\/p>\n

The Spacious Apartment<\/em><\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/a>The cartoon at left (click to enlarge<\/a>) shows a property manager or rental agent delivering the opening lines of her sales pitch about the apartment pictured.\u00a0 The lights in the unit are off and the prospective tenants have just stepped through the door.\u00a0 The couple cannot see the window and its planetary view, as the door is in their way.\u00a0 Rather, their concerned gazes are focused on something on the other side of the room.\u00a0 What could be over there?<\/p>\n

One would think that the winning caption should answer the question: what is it that the prospective tenants see that concerns them (and which the agent hopes to explain away)?\u00a0 The scene in the window provides a clue but cannot itself be the answer, being that the couple has yet to look in that direction.\u00a0 Nonetheless, here are the captions selected by the\u00a0 New Yorker <\/em>as the three finalists:<\/p>\n

“It’s the closest you’ll get to Manhattan in your price range.”<\/em><\/p>\n

“Keep in mind the neighborhood is expanding.<\/em>“<\/p>\n

“And, if you open the window, the view will take your breath away.<\/em>“<\/p>\n

Note that none<\/em> of these captions adequately explains or even bothers to address the source of the couple’s concerned gazes.\u00a0 Is there an alien being across the room?\u00a0 Is there another floor-to-ceiling window?\u00a0 Or maybe there is nothing over there at all, no walls or floors or ceilings… just empty space.\u00a0 We don’t know.\u00a0 None of these captions advance the story.<\/p>\n

I clicked through at least thirty reader-submitted captions for this cartoon.\u00a0 I would say that nearly a third of them incorporated some variation on “the view is out of this world.<\/em>” This of course is both the most obvious and least intellectually-satisfying response, sort of the Neil Diamond of captions.\u00a0 That this clich\u00e9 did not make the list of finalists is of some credit to the New Yorker<\/em>, but then Neil Diamond was more Brooklyn than Manhattan.<\/p>\n

In any event, all of the finalist captions violated an important precept of Cartooning 101, which is that the drawing and the caption must work together seamlessly.\u00a0 Vital elements in the drawing must be referenced in the caption, and vice versa, else there is dissonance.\u00a0 One can’t simply ignore the expressions on characters’ faces.*<\/p>\n

William Tell Revisited<\/em><\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/a>Our second cartoon (click to enlarge<\/a>) offers a variation on the tale of the Swiss marksman William Tell.\u00a0 You may recall that Tell was forced by a local magistrate to shoot an apple off the head of his son, so that their lives may be spared.\u00a0 Here, however, a cherry has been placed atop the boy’s head rather than the legendary apple.\u00a0 In an unusual move for the New Yorker<\/em>, the cherry has been colored red to draw the viewer’s attention.\u00a0 Tell looks worried; his son wears a narrow-eyed scowl.\u00a0 The background elements are unimportant.<\/p>\n

So what is the boy saying to his worried father?\u00a0 Here are the New Yorker<\/em>‘s three finalists:<\/p>\n

“I’m just saying, after this haircut, it’s difficult to trust you.<\/em>“<\/p>\n

“I now see why you only get me every other weekend.”<\/em><\/p>\n

“You know, pumpkins are in season too.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Let’s consider these in turn.\u00a0 In the first caption (the winner), the cherry is totally ignored; the caption would have the same relevance if the target were an apple.\u00a0 So let’s just forget about the target and make fun of the boy’s hair shall we?\u00a0 As the caption is only marginally funny in any case, I give it a D-plus.<\/p>\n

The second caption also fails to acknowledge the cherry.\u00a0 Yes, being the son of William Tell may have its occupational hazards, but this caption would have worked just as well with the original apple.\u00a0 If I were to channel my inner New Yorker — and I had just finished a good martini at Rockefeller Center — I might grant this one a middling C.<\/p>\n

The third caption at least makes reference to the size of the target, so partial credit for that.\u00a0 However, the boy’s remark implies that it is his father who has chosen the target, which contradicts the legend.\u00a0 And if I may nitpick, there were no pumpkins in Europe when the William Tell narrative arose.\u00a0 Pumpkins — native to America — became known to Europeans only after a 1584 expedition by Jacques Cartier, over a hundred years later.\u00a0 Furthermore, pumpkins and cherries are not<\/em> in season at the same time, not even in modern-day Switzerland.\u00a0 So the whole premise is unsupported by both fact and legend.\u00a0 This means I will have to give the third caption a C-minus for sloppy research as well as dearth of funniness.<\/p>\n

At this point, you are probably anticipating that I am going to offer my own killer captions for these cartoons.\u00a0 No, not today.\u00a0 As they say, those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.\u00a0 Or they run the caption contest at the New Yorker<\/em>.<\/p>\n

_________________<\/p>\n

* Don’t get me started about all the contest entries in which the caption is delivered by a character whose mouth is closed.\u00a0 However, that’s not the New Yorker<\/em>‘s fault — perhaps blame Bordeaux.<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New Yorker weekly magazine, long renowned for its single-panel cartoons, features a\u00a0 cartoon caption contest in its online edition.\u00a0 The premise sounds like fun — but this being the notoriously fussy New Yorker, the simple task of crowning a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humor","category-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23743"}],"version-history":[{"count":69,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24037,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23743\/revisions\/24037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}