This contest featured a cartoon by Mike Shiell, who joined our judging panel. Mike is best known for supervising and directing Emmy-nominated children’s shows like “The Backyardigans” and “Mike the Knight.”
In his drawing, two anthropomorphic hot dogs are on a rotating roller grill, the kind you see at concession stands in movie theaters. The hot dog on the bottom is shriveled and dry, and it’s addressing a plump hot dog on the top roller. Mike’s original caption—“Relax kid, you’re going to be here for a while.”—alludes to the fact that very few people buy movie theater hot dogs, and with good reason.
Remember the “Seinfeld” episode that followed Kramer’s efforts to renovate and reopen an old movie theater? He gets help from Lloyd Braun, who’s using his connections in the mayor’s office to give the theater landmark status. When Lloyd visits the theater and tries to buy a hot dog that looks very much like the shriveled one in Mike’s cartoon, the man working the concession stand asks, “Are you out of your mind? This hot dog’s been here since the silent era. You’d have to be insane to eat it.” Kramer, eager to avoid embarrassing Lloyd (who was recently hospitalized after suffering a nervous breakdown), insists on eating the hod dog himself. He takes a bite and says, “That’s delicious. It’s a perfectly sane food to eat.” Then his expression changes and he runs outside, where he gets violently ill.
Movie theaters, of course, are not the only places you’ll find hot dogs on rotating roller grills. They’re also at convenience stores (“I’m about to go to 7-Eleven heaven.”) and baseball parks:
- “After the fourth or fifth beer, I start to look better.”
- “The bottom of the ninth comes for us all.”
I expected this contest to elicit a lot of penis jokes and was relieved to see only one, which was more than enough: “When I was a footlong, I could have any bun I wanted.” That entry also qualifies as the month’s worst pun, but it had competition: “My agent called it a theater in the round.”
Trevor liked this pun—“They call me Hebrew Regional.”—and spent an inordinate amount of time explaining to Bob why he thought it worked. We all agreed, however, that the best pun was, “I’m beyond fixings.”
The next three entries put a clever twist on common expressions, and I suspect the first two were submitted by someone who was trying to think of the best way to deliver the joke:
- “Every dog has his day. Mine was last Thursday.”
- “Every dog has his day. Mine was in 1987.”
- “It’s not the heat, it’s the humiliation.”
Each of the following entries explains why the hot dog on the bottom is in such a sorry state:
- “I’ve been here since ‘Gone with the Wind.’”
- “How long have I been asleep?”
- “Is it obvious I’m organic?”
- “I guess I fell asleep.”
- “Don’t smoke.”
Whereas the next set of captions explain why the hot dog on top looks so much better:
- “You must be relatively new here.”
- “Who did your filler?”
- “Botox?”
Some entries suggested that the hot dog on the bottom doesn’t mind looking so desiccated:
- “Lay low and look as disgusting as you can. I’ve seen what happens if you’re selected.”
- “They’ll eat pretty ones like you for lunch.”
- “Do you think I want to be chosen?”
- “Beats the alternative.”
- “You’re next.”
Other entries, however, suggested that he’d rather be consumed than continue living as a dried-out, shrunken and shriveled piece of meat:
- “First you worry they’re coming for you. Then you worry they’re not.”
- “All things considered, I’d rather be eaten.”
- “Ah, to be young and edible.”
These next three captions allude to the fact that the hot dogs are rotating:
- “When I was your age, we had to crank the wheel ourselves!”
- “This is the worst ride I’ve ever been on.”
- “Sorry, kid, it’s not a Ferris Wheel.”
This caption is good but dark: “Sorry, kid. I’ve learned not to bond.” It made me think of the books I read about The Vietnam War—“Dispatches,” “The Things They Carried,” “Going After Cacciato,” “Blood Brothers,” “The 13th Valley”—all of which addressed the fact that soldiers were often reluctant to get close to new members of their companies because those new members might get killed.
Here’s another good but dark joke: “There’s only one way out of here and it’s on a bun.”
I’m ambivalent about this next entry: “At least it’s better than having sticks showed up our butts.” I like the premise, but the first two words are unnecessary and the last word is offputtingly cute. “Butts” sounds like something a child would say. Is “asses” a better punchline? Let’s try it: “It’s better than having sticks showed up our asses.” Yes, that works.
The final caption I’m choosing to highlight—“When you reach a certain age, you become invisible.”—reminded me of what Leonard Cohen said when he was 81 and ruminating on stage about the “various stages that a man goes through in relation to his allure to the opposite sex:”
You start off irresistible
And, then you become resistible
And then you become transparent
Not exactly invisible, but as if you are seen
Through old plastic
And then you actually do become invisible
Congratulations to MARK SCHAEFER, who submitted the winning caption: “I’m beyond fixings.”
The five runners-up are:
- “First you worry they’re coming for you. Then you worry they’re not.”
- “This is the worst ride I’ve ever been on.”
- “It’s not the heat, it’s the humiliation.”
- “Sorry, kid. I’ve learned not to bond.”
- “How long have I been asleep?”
If you want to see how we made our selections, we recorded the process and posted it on our YouTube Channel.