Caption Contest Commentary

Robert Leighton’s cartoon is set in an office, where all but one of the employees is carrying his or her own ventriloquist’s dummy. One of these employees is saying something to a co-worker who does not have a dummy. I first thought about ventriloquists who use their dummies to make insulting or vulgar comments, a…
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Brooke Bourgeois’s cartoon is set under the sea, where a disgruntled octopus has been put in a pillory with nine holes, one for each of his eight tentacles and one for his head. Swimming around the octopus are several fish, one of whom, in the lower-left corner of the drawing, is speaking. Here’s a pun…
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In Evan Lian’s cartoon, two storks are making their deliveries. One is carrying a baby. The other has a pink mustache—a reference to the ride-sharing service Lyft—and carries a young man with a backpack on his lap. The stork with the mustache is speaking. This cartoon has three frames of reference: baby-delivering storks, the young…
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Bob Eckstein’s cartoon has three distinct frames of reference — Halloween, the election, and the pandemic. Addressing all three is a challenge. The woman who’s next in line for the voting booth is speaking. She’s also pointing with her left index finger, but at what? The skeleton? The man in the voting booth? Or is…
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Jeremy Nguyen’s cartoon is set in a library, where cadavers—their bodies covered with sheets, their left toes tagged—are stretched out on every available surface. Two librarians, one male and one female, are looking at a cadaver that’s on a bookcase in front of a “new arrivals” sign. The female librarian is speaking. Because corpses need…
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A few weeks ago, we featured a Lars Kenseth cartoon that was set in an office building, where a wizard carrying a banker’s box (implying that he had just been fired or laid-off) was addressing his colleague. It therefore had two strikingly disparate frames of reference—downsizing at the workplace, and the wizard’s magical powers—and the…
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