This month the cartoonist, Juan Astasio Soriano, joined our panel of judges from Madrid. His drawing is set on a busy sidewalk, where two tiny aliens with ray guns have emerged from their flying saucers. They’re surrounded by and at risk of being squashed to death by huge pedestrians, whom we see only from the knees down. One alien is addressing the other. Astasio’s original caption suggests that the little green men are unprepared because the Earthlings looked so much smaller when viewed from the aliens’ home planet: “To be fair, it was hard to estimate the scale of the operation from Alpha Centauri.”
Several of you provided similar explanations:
- “I must have been looking through the wrong end of the telescope.”
- “They looked a lot smaller from 53 trillion miles away.”
- “They looked smaller from a distance.”
- “From space they looked so tiny.”
This entry has the speaker focusing on an irrelevant concern and oblivious to the real threat: “Don’t worry; Texas is an open carry State.”
Though I typically prefer captions that are short and have no exclamation points, this unusually long entry made me laugh out loud, and every one of the many words, as well the exclamation point, is necessary: “For God’s sake, Frank, you’re a bright green alien monster with a death ray—now go out there and act like one!”
Here are the month’s best:
Joke about foot odor: “I expected fresher air.”
Political joke: “Careful – half of them hate guns, and the other half hate illegal aliens.”
And sick joke: “If I’m not back in five minutes, call for a spatula.”
Here are two variations on a famous line from “Star Trek:”
- “Set phasers to Antifungal.”
- “Set phasers to stub.”
That second entry is especially good, not only because it follows one of the most important rules of good caption writing—end on the punchline—but because it turns the very last letter (b) into the punchline. I’ve never seen that before.
The next three entries have the aliens wisely rethinking their strategy:
- “Unless you brought the shrink ray, I say we get the hell out of here.”
- “What about, ‘Take me to your smallest leader.’”
- “So, hearts and minds, then?”
I love the following two captions, both of which turn the alien who’s speaking into a very funny coward:
- “You go ahead and attack. I’ll close up the ship.”
- “No, you demand they surrender.”
Can’t you just hear Woody Allen or Bob Hope delivering those lines?
Speaking of Bob Hope, here’s a great deadpan joke: “Remind me to send a stern letter to the planetary scouting division.”
This entry suggests that the aliens’ position may be better than it initially appeared: “Luckily they have small brains.”
My fellow judges loved this variation on that most famous line from “Jaws”— “We’re gonna need a bigger probe.”—but I did not. “We’re gonna need a bigger ________” is now a tired caption cliché. It appears in crowdsourcing every week The New Yorker contest features a drawing with something unusually large, and the joke’s no longer fresh. Here’s another and slightly darker variation on the same tired cliché: “We’re gonna need a bigger cookbook.”
These captions all suggest that the aliens will have trouble abducting such large pedestrians:
- “What about just hair samples?”
- “Maybe we can strap one to the hood.”
- “So much for our abduction plans.”
Here’s a great example of transforming an ordinary statement into a caption that makes perfect sense within the contest of the drawing: “They’ll never see us coming.”
And here’s an entry that delighted the judges (especially Bob) because it was so unexpected and it undermined our assumption that the aliens were hostile invaders trying to take over the planet: “The scavenger list specifically says Ferragamo.”
Congratulations to JAMES MOLE, who submitted this month’s winning caption: “You go ahead and attack. I’ll close up the ship.” The five runners-up are:
- “What about just hair samples?”
- “We’re gonna need a bigger probe.”
- “Set phasers to stub.”
- “They’ll never see us coming.”
- “They looked smaller from a distance.”
Watch the Judging Process
For those of you who want to see how we made our selections, we recorded the process with Juan and its posted here
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