This month’s contest featured a drawing by New Yorker cartoonist Bob Eckstein, whose most recent book just came out. It’s called “Footnotes from the Most Fascinating Museums—Stories and Memorable Moments from People Who Love Museums.” It includes many beautiful drawings of museums or pieces from the museums’ permanent collections, and stories from people like Bill Murray and Bob Mankoff. You can buy it now at your local bookstore or on-line, but Eckstein really hopes you’ll support local booksellers. You can also subscribe to his newsletter here: https://thebob.substack.com/
Eckstein (I keep referring to him by his last name to distinguish him from Bob Mankoff) joined our judges’ panel to help select the winning entry and five runners-up. His drawing is set in a courtroom, where all the characters are anthropomorphic chess pieces. The jurors are black and white pawns, the judge is a black king, and the witness is a white knight who’s being questioned by a black bishop.
Eckstein’s original caption—“Did you, or did you not, move diagonally?”— reconciled the courtroom setting with the ways that chess pieces move. It also suggested that the knight violated the rules/broke the law by moving not in an “L-shape,” as he should, but like a bishop.
As Eckstein did, many of you focused on the way that certain chess pieces move:
- “Three witnesses testified that you couldn’t walk straight.”
- “Permission to zig-zag towards the bench.”
- “Your Honor, he’ll never go straight.”
- “Stop side-stepping the question.”
- “Don’t sidestep the question.”
- “Give us a straight answer.”
- “Why did you come forward and to the side?”
- “You may step down, and across.”
My fellow judges loved that last caption, but, as a lawyer, I had to object because a litigator would never say that. Only a judge would. That’s why I preferred the prior entry—“Why did you come forward and to the side?”—which is a variation on the same joke but makes more sense because “Why did you come forward?” is something a lawyer would actually ask a witness. My fellow judges didn’t care. What’s more, Eckstein liked “You may step down…” so much he said he would send whoever submitted that caption $500 out of his own pocket if we did not select it as one of the finalists. (Eckstein writes a lot about how hard it is to make a living as a cartoonist, but he must be doing all right if he has $500 to throw around like that.)
The other judges challenged my decision to champion this entry: “Did you jump the Queen?” While agreeing that it made sense within the context of the cartoon and was funny, they worried it was too close to a rape joke. I could have pointed out that the target of the joke was rapists and not survivors of sexual assault, but I shut up and moved on.
We then got into another sensitive and potentially risky area by discussing this entry: “I see here that you are a member of a white supremacy group.” We all thought it was clever and funny even though the first three words were a little clunky (maybe “I understand” would have been better), but Eckstein worried that it was too controversial. Now it was Eckstein’s turn to get overruled. The joke does not in any way suggest support for a racist philosophy; instead, it addresses the fact that the knight is part of an all-white team that wants to overpower all-black teams.
Mankoff also liked this race-based entry—“How you feelin’, white boy?”—though he said it would have made more sense if all the pawns in the jury were, like the lawyer and judge, black.
Several of you noted that chess pieces cannot move by themselves:
- “And do you see the ‘giant hand’ right now?”
- “Who here would have set you up?”
- “You expect us to believe you acted alone?”
- “Were you ever manipulated by the Russians?”
The following entry went after the same joke but had the wrong chess piece speaking: “Technically, I’m not responsible for any of my actions.” Joel Mishon attempted to defend that caption on the grounds that the knight may actually have been talking, but he was wrong. As for the “manipulated by an unseen hand” entries that correctly identified the bishop as the one who’s speaking, “You expect us to believe you acted alone?” could have also referred to the knight’s being part of a team. It works well either way. But the last entry was the best of the group because it alluded to the fact that many chess champions, including Garry Kasparov and Boris Spassky, have been Russian.
The following three entries did a good job of incorporating common chess terms:
- “Your Honor, my client claims he was only acting in Sicilian Defense.”
- “Was it self-defense, or was it a calculated plan of attack?”
- “Did you witness the attack?”
This pun was OK: “You have quite the checkered past.” But this one was far better: “Were you the knight in question?”
This next entry suggests that the knight is the defendant in a criminal trial, as opposed to a witness, and that he has asserted a defense that the prosecutor is trying to characterize as wildly implausible: “You expect us to believe that you have an exact twin?” It works because each chess team has two knights, but I wish the person who submitted that caption had substituted the word “identical” for “exact.” No one talks about exact twins. Because identical twins have the same DNA, the “evil twin” defense is not as rare as one might assume. See Tim Geyser, “Why Identical twins Are a Nightmare for the Legal System,” VICE News, January 1, 2021.
As usual, I will end with a few captions that don’t fit neatly into any category:
- “Objection! My client is entitled to a jury of his peers.”
- “Walk us through the events, one square at a time.”
- “And you just stood there?”
Congratulations to ABBY SIEGEL, who won the contest with, “You expect us to believe you have an exact twin?” The five runners-up are:
- “I see here that you are a member of a white supremacy group.”
- “Were you ever manipulated by Russians?”
- “You may step down, and across.”
- “Were you the knight in question?”
- “Don’t sidestep the question.”
Watch the Judging Process
If you who want to see how we made our selections, we recorded the process with Bob Eckstein and posted it below
Like what you see? Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more Caption Contest episodes.
And if, after buying Eckstein’s book, you want to pre-order my book on the caption contest—it won’t be available for purchase from your local bookseller until June 4, 2024—click on the following link: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250333407 Here’s what Kirkus Reviews has to say about it: “Wood has a great time here, mixing the bizarre, the jocular, and the wise into a clever package.”