Last week, The New Yorker began a weekly cartoon-caption contest. Here, Robert Mankoff, the magazine’s cartoon editor, discusses the contest—and its broader, humorous implications—with Ben Greenman.
BEN GREENMAN: So, the Cartoon Caption Contest is now a weekly feature in the magazine.
ROBERT MANKOFF: It is. The one special week a year that we used to have—the week of our special cartoon issue—has now become a weekly special week.
When was the first contest?
The very first caption contest ran in 1998. Since then, it’s been an annual event. And it worked so well that we’re picking up the pace a little bit.
When the contest began, seven years ago, what was the goal? To find out whether readers could complete captions? Or whether the cartoonists were in fact funny?
We didn't worry about whether the cartoonists were funny. We had already determined that through DNA analysis. What we were trying to do, mainly, was to create this odd sort of challenge for readers and discover whether the results were interesting. In other words, we wanted to know how inspiration was sparked when someone was looking at an image with an incongruity in it that called out for a comic line. For starters, we found that our readers are funny people. In every contest, lots of them come up with a general sort of funny idea. For example, in one of the contests, we ran a drawing by Mick Stevens that showed a man in jail; his cellmate was an angel. People got to some of the main humorous aspects right away. Why was the angel in jail? What could an angel have done that was so bad? Would he get time off for good behavior?. But that’s only the beginning. The real challenge in a contest like this is making that general funny idea work in the shortest possible form—using the economy of language and emphasis that’s necessary for a good cartoon. That’s where they fall short. Although, obviously, not all of them fall short.
So the people who can write a funny line are rarer than those who are generally funny?
At least in this particular instance. I think that a lot of people, if they devoted their life to this kind of thing, could reliably write funny lines. We’ll see if that happens with the more regular contests—if people hone their skills by writing captions more regularly.
From a reader’s perspective, the main goal is to enter the contest and see if he or she wins, or at least to see which captions are picked as the finalists. But from your perspective there’s another layer, which is that you get to see thousands of entries. This should give you a very good sense of what the average reader finds funny.
That’s partly true. It’s not an exact average, in that there’s a self-selection process. We’re not forcing readers to enter, so all the people who submit captions actually think they have a funny line. But otherwise what you say is exactly the case. When thousands of people look at a picture and try to explain what they find funny about it, you end up with a large set of possible jokes that resolve into a few main jokes.
Let’s take a more concrete example. Last year’s contest showed a man in a sushi bar. Behind the counter there was a professional human sushi chef, and next to him a giant squid wearing a chef’s cap. In that case, people came up with a few main kinds of ideas. Nepotism was a big theme—there were jokes that the man was somehow forced to hire the squid because he was related to the boss. Also there were jokes about outsourcing labor, or insourcing, and jokes about being intimidated by the squid. The point is that a surprisingly high percentage of the entrants found the same kinds of things funny.
But there’s a danger, for entrants, in writing the most predictable caption. If ten thousand people enter, and three hundred of them write almost the exact same line—“I wouldn’t have hired the squid, but he’s the boss’s nephew”— it’s very unlikely that will be the winning caption. This weekly contest works a little differently than the yearly ones, in that the magazine isn’t exactly picking the winner. We’re picking three finalists, and readers will select the winner by popular vote. Still, the most predictable formulations, while they might make a perfectly serviceable caption, aren’t likely to win.
Last year, The New Yorker published a book of all the cartoons in the magazine’s history. In it, there are a number of very good cartoons that have predictable, well-written lines. And then there are the much stranger captions, which may appeal to a smaller band of readers but might be, in some sense, funnier.
Well, the winning squid caption was “He feels he can do more good working within the system,” which is subtle and nice and well-put. There’s not a shocking, out-of-left-field idea powering it, but it’s a strange enough idea, that this squid has some kind of activist mind-set. But even predictable captions find their way to unpredictable situations. There’s a Peter Arno cartoon from the early forties that shows, in the background, some kind of military test plane crashed into the ground. In the foreground, one of the military officials is saying, “Well, back to the old drawing board.” That’s an ordinary sentence. It’s something someone would say. But it only seems predictable after the fact, after you’ve processed the picture and the particular embarrassed understatement of that phrase.
Let’s talk a bit about the images you’re picking. There are certain kinds of cartoons that wouldn’t work at all for this contest. There’s a famous New Yorker cartoon that you actually drew. The caption is “No, Thursday’s out. How about never—is never good for you?” But the image is just a man on a phone at a desk. It seems like that wouldn’t work.
It wouldn’t. People would just send in their generically funny man-on-phone lines, and we’d have no real standard for judging one against the other. Many would be funny in their own way, but there would be no competition between entries, no common ground, and, as a result, no contest. Now, if instead of the receiver he had a banana in his hand—
Yes?
Well, maybe that wouldn’t be so good. But a banana at least puts us on the right road. You need some sort of incongruous element. In the first weekly contest, we have a drawing by Mike Twohy that shows a scientist in a lab with his experimental mice. But the scientist himself is dressed in a giant mouse suit. Now, look—there are a lot of captions you could come up with for that. But many of the entries will follow the same lines: that he’s somehow the leader of the mice, that he’s trying to empathize with them by dressing as a mouse. For the readers entering the contest, it’s both a process of trying to imagine what the cartoonist had in mind and trying to articulate why the picture strikes them as funny.
In the past, cartoonists sometimes worked with writers: the artists drew the pictures and they had a collaborator who wrote the caption. As a cartoonist, have you found the two processes separable? Do you sometimes doodle, come up with a funny picture, and then go through a kind of internal caption contest?
I don’t think it ever happens that way, really. I think that as you’re drawing something incongruous your mind is already starting to shape the picture based on some text that you feel will make sense. You’re not drawing completely automatically. The other day, I started drawing a guy looking out his office window at the ledge of the building and seeing, like, a priest and a fireman and a policeman already out there. I’m thinking along certain lines, even though I haven’t exactly articulated them yet. Sometimes you will have a draft of a line, but even when you don’t your unconscious is directing the picture. There’s a reason you draw a policeman out there instead of a bowling ball, or a piece of fruit. It’s not that those other incongruities wouldn’t be funny—especially the bowling ball—but cartoon drawing always follows some illogical logic. Say that I drew acrobats out on the ledge. I would have made that choice because I would have felt a joke coming on. Maybe they’re standing on top of each other’s shoulders, sort of one-upping the guy who’s going to jump off the ledge. My point is that when you try to draw incongruous things the mind rebels against total incongruity. It still tries to fit it into something.
These contests could work as a kind of ongoing laboratory. Do you think that you’ll start to get a better sense of how the human comic mind works?
I hope so. If there’s anything in any way funny about a drawing—it may not rise to the level of a great cartoon, but it’s there—thousands of people looking at it will find that angle and attempt to explain it in some way. Plus, if we do it for seventy-five years, we can track how humor changes over time.
It’s all going to be about robots.
If we launch a probe into space, we ought to make sure that some sample of this caption contest is included, so that alien civilizations understand the types of humor that we had. It will seem, of course, very primitive to them, being millions of years advanced.
They’ll send back their entries. That’s what happens to the highly advanced civilizations: they get cocky about winning.
But they’re going to miss the deadline, because, you know, you just get one week. ♦