Caption Contest Commentary

For the first time, our panel of judges did not include Bob Mankoff, who was busy preparing for his daughter Sarah’s wedding. Congratulations to Bob, his wife Cory, and especially Sarah. In the HBO Documentary “Very Semi-Serious,” Sarah recalls a time when she was much younger and told Bob that something he said wasn’t funny,…
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This month our panel of judges included the cartoonist Pat Byrnes, who created what is, in my opinion, one of the best New Yorker cartoons of all time: BUY THIS CARTOON His captionless drawing for our contest is set in Africa, where two zebras with the traditional black and white stripes are looking at a…
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This month our panel of judges included the cartoonist Jason Adam Katzenstein. His captionless drawing is set at a graduation ceremony, where a dog is delivering the commencement address to a class of graduating canines. Jason’s original caption mocked the commencement speaker who starts his address by providing the dictionary definition of a word he…
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Joe Dator’s cartoon alludes to a story from the Aeneid. The Trojan War had been dragging on for ten years, so the Greek king Odysseus suggested building a huge wooden horse large enough to hold a select force of soldiers, including Odysseus himself. The Greeks left the horse outside the walled city of Troy and…
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In Amy Kurzweil’s cartoon, a young woman in a bathrobe is showing another woman, who’s fully though casually dressed, her bedroom closet. Inside the closet, neatly arranged on the shelves, are several large jars, each of which contains a human brain floating in some kind of solution and attached to tubes. The woman in the…
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This month the cartoonist, Lynn Hsu, joined our panel of judges. Her drawing is set on a residential street where a realtor is showing to a potentially interested buyer a huge cat tower that’s for sale. The realtor is gesturing toward the property and saying something. Hsu’s original caption reconciles the disparate elements (cats and…
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