The guy I'm tied with, Carl Gable, from Norcross, Ga., won the first annual contest and two of the weeklies I've won three weeklies. I would've guessed about every other week. The New Yorker's records show that I've submitted 38 times, but I think it's gotta be more than that. I think I submitted an entry to the first weekly contest. How often had you submitted captions before you had success?Ī while. The ones they like best probably surprise them. Sometimes I think they're looking for something out of left field. I think they're looking for something that makes them laugh. What else do you think the magazine's editors are looking for in their selection process? I wish I could say mine were really funny, but I think they fall more into the clever category. But there are others I've seen not mine, I hasten to add that really are terrific and funny. He's right that sometimes you see a winning caption that's clever but not really funny. I think you should try to be as funny as you can. I think the more successful captions address everything that's going on. Sometimes somebody will submit a caption that addresses one thing going on in the cartoon, but not something else that's pretty obvious. Try to incorporate everything that's going on in the cartoon. What are the top two or three tips you have for caption writers?īe brief. When more than one person submits the winning caption, they just choose a winner at random. There was one time when I turned in what ended up being the winning caption, but perhaps 1,000 people sent it in I think it was a pretty obvious fit for the cartoon. There could have been 100 people who sent in something along the same lines. That killed me he had a great caption, but I really loved that cartoon and my caption was almost identical to his, and mine was shorter. The projection you're talking about calls to mind a great Slate article in which a caption-contest winner explained that the trick to winning was using common cliches about the cartoon subject.Ī colleague emailed me that article, by Patrick House. That didn't go over well with my colleagues, because I'm a poverty lawyer. And I thought of the caption (registration required). And one of the most common and nastiest things people say about panhandlers is that they should get a job. I just tried to think about stereotypical things people think about dolphins and panhandlers. In the first contest I won, showed a panhandling dolphin, a guy reaching into his back pocket to give him some money, and a woman yelling something at him. Sometimes something comes pretty quickly. I come to work on Monday, and the first thing I do is log onto the New Yorker website and check out the cartoon for 10 minutes or so. What's your approach to writing these captions?
#NEW YORKER CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST HOW TO#
(Another caption-master has also won three times, though one was under different rules.) Wood spoke to TIME about how to game the contest and how he gets out the vote. On June 1, Wood, a 46-year-old attorney from Chicago, found out he'd captured the weekly contest for a record third time.
At least 5,000 would-be wordsmiths play the contest each week of those, three entries are selected by the magazine as finalists, and the winner is chosen in an online vote. Larry Wood's forte is winning the New Yorker's Caption Contest, in which readers are invited to submit the perfect quip to accompany the magazine's back-page cartoon. Follow all have our peculiar talents: an uncanny sense of direction, a knack for knowing when to dump a stock, an ability to bake the perfect cake.
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