![]() One entry per person, e-mail address, or Instagram account. To enter using Instagram, comment on the cartoon posted on using the hashtag #MyNewYorkerCaption, for your caption to be considered as an official entry (a “Submission”) in the contest. In the words of Dan Heath, the last winner of the yearly contest (the contest switched from yearly to weekly in 2005), “The one regret I have about winning the cartoon-caption contest is that it unmasks me as the sort of person who enters cartoon-caption contests.To enter online, fill in the information on the page entitled “Enter Contest” and include a caption of 250 characters or less for the featured cartoon (the “Submission”). If I win, great like Patrick House, I can say I write for The New Yorker. Voting runs through this Sunday, at which point I can turn my attention to other things. My caption: “Here’s a little number about how much I hate fish.”) (My favorite of my semi-recent entries - and here I’m descending into Roger Ebert territory - was for this cartoon. I don’t even love my caption: it’s more witty than funny. Still, I don’t know why I’ve let this contest take over my life. Her parting shot: “Well, if you must know, he makes me laugh.” And maybe that’s who I really want to be: the guy the clown’s being left for. At a sidewalk cafe, a woman is about to turn her back on a distraught clown. My favorite caption over the nearly five-year history of the weekly contest belongs to Jacqueline Tager of Hollywood, California. (He gives away his secrets, here.) Roger Ebert has tried and tried and tried to win. Larry Wood, a Chicago-based attorney, has won three times. He also recommends avoiding proper nouns.) Poet and New York Times critic Joel Brouwer has won. (His much-quoted advice: Don’t be too funny. ![]() So, who wins the contest, in any given week? Stanford neuroscientist Patrick House won in 2008 and then wrote a smart piece about the experience for Slate. The issues that arise when writing a caption - issues of pacing, of word choice, of weight - are the same issues I want my students to consider when writing anything: an essay, an email, a villanelle. And what better way to focus on the sentence than to write a caption? I’m serious. Writing good essays, I stressed, wasn’t so much about coming up with good ideas it was about writing good sentences. First at the University of Washington, and then at the University of Michigan, I ran weekly in-class contests, with prizes awarded to the winners. ![]() (Again, in this way, our captions resembled our poems.)Įven better, I had used the caption contest as a teaching tool in my college writing courses. (In this way, our captions resembled our poems.) We’d lob questions back and forth - “Do captions ever have semi-colons?” - and we’d laugh extra-hard when our captions were extra-mean. We’d gripe about losing, sure - but the real object was to amuse each other. I’d probably entered the contest 100, maybe 150 times, before last week but, looking back on it, what I enjoyed most about all those submissions was sharing my entry with a friend and fellow caption-writer. It’s gone from something that occupied maybe ten minutes of a typical Sunday to something that haunts my days and chills my dreaming nights. Yes, I’ve been going to work yes, I’ve been eating ( too much, even) but mostly I’ve just been thinking about the contest. This means that (a) I have a 33% chance of finally winning the thing, and (b) my entire month is being wiped out. The winning caption: it’s the thing I most want.Īt last, this week, I’m a finalist. ![]() Whereas every week, or almost every week, I submit a caption to the magazine’s cartoon caption contest. And while I, too, would love for Paul Muldoon to tap me on the shoulder and say, “Yes, Cody, your Obama clerihews have just the right mix of reserve and pathos,” the truth is that I haven’t submitted a poem to the magazine in about ten years. ![]() Lots of poets dream of publishing a poem in The New Yorker.
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