Liam Walsh’s cartoon is set in the Arctic, where one polar bear is standing in judgment of another who’s sitting on the edge of a melting ice floe and dangling his feet in the water while trying to enjoy a cigarette. The smoking bear, who looks annoyed, has turned his head to say something to the bear who’s judging him.
Each of my captions suggests that climate change has made the smoking bear so fatalistic he no longer cares about tobacco-related health risks:
- “We’re all dead in five years, anyway.”
- “Cancer is the least of our worries.”
- “I’m going to enjoy the limited time we do have.”
Now let’s see how you did:
Many of you went after the same joke I did:
- “Maybe the Surgeon General should be warning us about shrinking ice floes instead.”
- “We’ll all be dead in twelve years anyway.”
- “I’ll decide how I go extinct.”
- “I’ll take lung cancer over global warming.”
- “It beats dying from climate change.”
- “Second-hand smoke is the least of your worries.”
- “We should be so lucky to live long enough to die from cancer.”
That last entry is long, but I like how it makes the bear sound like an old Jew.
Here are two captions that come at the climate crisis from a slightly different but still tobacco-related angle:
- “I’ll quit when the glaciers come back.”
- “The smoking section melted.”
Smoking after sex is a trope, and this entry does a nice and subtle job of alluding to it: “You always want to cuddle.”
Here’s a much cruder sex joke, but I feel compelled to highlight it, both because it addresses the position of the bear’s right arm and it made me laugh out loud: “Smoking and masturbating. And you?”
The next three captions are variations on Matthew 7:1 (“Judge not, lest ye be judged):
- “Do I harass you about all the mercury you’re ingesting?”
- “I didn’t judge you for the baby seal.”
- “But you can eat seal pups.”
These two entries have the bear defensively lashing out:
- “I notice your mouth’s been emitting a lot of carbon lately, too.”
- “Your nagging isn’t helping global warming either.”
Here’s a clever and unexpected reference to a popular nature documentary: “Tell Attenborough I’ll be there in five.”
The bear may be smoking because he’s stressed:
- “You cope with climate change your way and I’ll cope with it my way.”
- “Well, how am I supposed to cope with the stress of climate change?”
Or upset: “A walrus called me fat, ok? A walrus!”
Or bored: “What else is there to do on this iceberg?”
Here’s a fine example of taking a common phrase and, by modifying it just slightly (in this case, by omitting a single word), giving it a fitting meaning within the context of the cartoon: “Lighten up — it’s the end of the world.”
I expected many references to Smokey the Bear (the title of this commentary), but I didn’t expect to like any of them. I was, therefore, pleasantly surprised by this clever reference to Smokey’s famous catchphrase: “Only you can prevent me from enjoying the one thing that gives me pleasure in life.”
Finally, one of you suggested the bear’s smoking to relieve stress, but only because he can’t get drunk: “I’d drink, but we’re running out of ice.”
This week’s winner is, “Second-hand smoke is the least of your worries.”
Lawrence Wood has won The New Yorker’s Cartoon Caption Contest a record-setting seven times and been a finalist four other times. He has collaborated with New Yorker cartoonists Peter Kuper, Lila Ash, Felipe Galindo Gomez, and Harry Bliss (until Bliss tossed him aside, as anyone would, to collaborate with Steve Martin). Nine of his collaborations have appeared in The New Yorker, and one is included in The New Yorker Encyclopedia of Cartoons.