Bob Mankoff is back. Three weeks ago he delivered the Alumni Keynote address at his alma mater, Syracuse University (where my father taught for nearly forty years), and last Friday he rejoined our caption contest judging panel to help select the winner and finalists in this month’s competition.
The contest featured a drawing by Todd Condron, who also joined our judging panel and has more than 1,300 cartoons available for purchase on the CartoonStock website. Todd’s drawing is set in a suburban backyard, where two men are standing by the edge of a huge sinkhole and looking at a car that’s fallen in. Only the back half of the car is visible. Both men are happily eating sandwiches, and one of them is addressing the other.
Condron’s original caption—“I forgot how satisfying it is to eat a sandwich over a sinkhole”—was inspired by his parents’ love for a series of Lawrence Sanders mystery novels that featured a detective, Edward X. Delaney, who ate sandwiches over his sink.
A couple of you made similar jokes:
- “Doesn’t food always taste better when you’re eating it over a car-filled sinkhole?”
- “Let’s never go back to eating over the kitchen sink.”
There were a lot of puns, and the best two were:
- “Why did they send us for heroes?”
- “There goes the neighbor.”
“Heroes,” however, doesn’t really work because only one of the two men is eating a submarine sandwich. Also, no one would have asked the men to get help by finding heroes. “Neighbor” works better, as it puts a clever twist on a common expression simply by removing the last syllable of the final word.
This next caption takes a common expression and gives it a new and fitting meaning within the context of the cartoon: “You really drove that car into the ground.”
This entry suggests the sandwich-lovers are evil—“After lunch, let’s cover it with branches and try to catch more.”—while the next four suggest they’re shockingly callous:
- “I did hear some yelling, but that was a couple days ago.”
- “Hang in there, Dave! This is as fast as we can chew!”
- “Two more bites and then we check for survivors.”
- “Bummer about the chips and drinks. And Todd.”
As someone who’s never forgotten being scolded back in 1975 for getting crumbs on the backseat of my friend’s father’s Mercedes—God, did I hate that car—I liked this caption: “Be careful—you’re getting crumbs all over my car.”
These next two captions refer to the car’s position in the sinkhole:
- “Good thing we packed the sandwiches in the trunk.”
- “Who taught this guy how to vertical park?”
There were several jokes suggesting that the driver was still in the car, and that the men on the edge of the sinkhole were offering him useless advice:
- “He’s trying, but the front tires keep spinning in the mud.”
- “Have you tried putting it in reverse?”
- “Try reverse!”
The next caption alludes to the misconception that someone who digs a hole from some spot in the Unites States to the other end of the Earth would end up in China: “Tony’s really craving Chinese.”
These entries suggest that the beverages are still in the car, and that the men on the edge of the sinkhole are overly concerned about them:
- “I wonder what’s left of my Big Gulp.”
- “I hope he didn’t spill our drinks.”
The next two entries are funny, but they’re not specific enough to the scenario:
- “Looks like a you problem.”
- “I’m sure it will buff out.”
This caption is mildly funny in a dark way, and it works, but it’s too much like the old “Take my wife, please” jokes that haven’t aged particularly well: “The important thing is, other than our wives, no one was hurt.”
This caption seems funny at first, but it doesn’t really make sense because it suggests cars have been racing through the neighbors’ backyards on a regular basis: “This works much better than speed bumps.”
This next caption came out of left field, but it addresses every aspect of the cartoon while explaining how the car ended up in the sinkhole, and it made me laugh out loud: “I sold the hazard signs and bought lunch.”
Some of my fellow judges liked this next caption, which turns on the double meaning of the last word: “You’re leaking oil.”
Here’s a decent example of the oblivious speaker entry: “Look—some moron’s composting a Buick.”
And finally, here’s a caption that has the man who’s speaking looking on the bright side: “Well, it could have been worse. We could have left our lunch in the car.”
Congratulations to GRANT MIEKLE, who submitted the winning caption: “Two more bites and then we check for survivors.” Meikle is a cartoonist who goes by the alias “Scribbly G,” and he submitted the drawing for last month’s caption contest.
The five runners-up are:
- “I did hear some yelling, but that was a couple days ago.”
- “Hang in there, Dave! This is as fast as we can chew!”
- “Be careful—you’re getting crumbs all over my car.”
- “Bummer about the chips and drinks. And Todd.”
- “I sold the hazard signs and bought lunch.”
If you want to see how we made our selections, we recorded the process and posted it on our YouTube Channel.
Last Promotion of My Book
This Thursday marks the one-year anniversary of the publication of Your Caption Has Been Selected so I’m making a last push to increase sales, especially since Father’s Day is approaching and you may be struggling to think of an appropriate gift.
The book’s been well received by critics and regular readers. If you like science fiction—I don’t, but you may—you should know that Orson Scott Card, the Hugo- and Nebula Award-winning author of “Ender’s Game,” wrote,
Lawrence Wood gives us the joy and pain of coming up with good captions, and shows the fine line between merely good and good enough to win. Tragedy is easy, but comedy is hard. Wood has proven he can do funny and clever and win the votes of thousands of strangers. Five stars.
Most of the other 130 customer reviews on Amazon and GoodReads have been similarly positive, but there were two notable exceptions:
- Some guy named John wrote, You might think it impossible to have an uninteresting book about cartoons in The New Yorker, but here we are. What kills it for me is the author, who might be one of the smuggest people you could hope to encounter. After about the 10th time that this guy goes on about the “wonder of me,” you’re content to just look at the cartoons and ditch the rest. Two stars.
- Someone else who goes only by the initial K was equally harsh: I won this book in a prerelease giveaway. The insert said “New Yorker readers will get a kick out of this.” I’m not, so maybe that’s why I found nothing positive to say about it. The cartoons are bad, the captions are predictable, and overall, not interesting. I can’t believe someone would even think about writing a book about this. 2 sympathy stars.
So I can’t guarantee you’ll like the book, but there’s a good chance you will. If you’ve already bought one or more copies, I can’t thank you enough, but please buy a few more.