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This month\u2019s contest featured a drawing by <\/span>New Yorker<\/span><\/i> cartoonist Bob Eckstein<\/a>, whose most recent book just came out. It\u2019s called \u201cFootnotes from the Most Fascinating Museums\u2014Stories and Memorable Moments from People Who Love Museums.\u201d It includes many beautiful drawings of museums or pieces from the museums\u2019 permanent collections, and stories from people like Bill Murray and Bob Mankoff. You can buy it now at your local bookstore or on-line, but Eckstein really hopes you\u2019ll support local booksellers. You can also subscribe to his newsletter here: <\/span>https:\/\/thebob.substack.com\/<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n Eckstein (I keep referring to him by his last name to distinguish him from Bob Mankoff) joined our judges\u2019 panel to help select the winning entry and five runners-up. His drawing is set in a courtroom, where all the characters are anthropomorphic chess pieces. The jurors are black and white pawns, the judge is a black king, and the witness is a white knight who\u2019s being questioned by a black bishop.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Eckstein\u2019s original caption\u2014<\/span>\u201cDid you, or did you not, move diagonally?\u201d<\/i><\/b>\u2014 reconciled the courtroom setting with the ways that chess pieces move. It also suggested that the knight violated the rules\/broke the law by moving not in an \u201cL-shape,\u201d as he should, but like a bishop.<\/span><\/p>\n As Eckstein did, many of you focused on the way that certain chess pieces move:<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n My fellow judges loved that last caption, but, as a lawyer, I had to object because a litigator would never say that. Only a judge would. That\u2019s why I preferred the prior entry\u2014<\/span>\u201cWhy did you come forward and to the side?\u201d<\/i><\/b>\u2014which is a variation on the same joke but makes more sense because \u201cWhy did you come forward?\u201d is something a lawyer would actually ask a witness. My fellow judges didn\u2019t care. What\u2019s more, Eckstein liked \u201cYou may step down\u2026\u201d so much he said he would send whoever submitted that caption $500 out of his own pocket if we did not select it as one of the finalists. (Eckstein writes a lot about how hard it is to make a living as a cartoonist, but he must be doing all right if he has $500 to throw around like that.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The other judges challenged my decision to champion this entry: <\/span>\u201cDid you jump the Queen?\u201d<\/i><\/b> While agreeing that it made sense within the context of the cartoon and was funny, they worried it was too close to a rape joke. I could have pointed out that the target of the joke was rapists and not survivors of sexual assault, but I shut up and moved on.<\/span><\/p>\n We then got into another sensitive and potentially risky area by discussing this entry: <\/span>\u201cI see here that you are a member of a white supremacy group.\u201d <\/i><\/b>We all thought it was clever and funny even though the first three words were a little clunky (maybe \u201cI understand\u201d would have been better), but Eckstein worried that it was too controversial. Now it was Eckstein\u2019s turn to get overruled. The joke does not in any way suggest support for a racist philosophy; instead, it addresses the fact that the knight is part of an all-white team that wants to overpower all-black teams.<\/span><\/p>\n Mankoff also liked this race-based entry\u2014<\/span>\u201cHow you feelin\u2019, white boy?\u201d<\/i><\/b>\u2014though he said it would have made more sense if all the pawns in the jury were, like the lawyer and judge, black.<\/span><\/p>\n Several of you noted that chess pieces cannot move by themselves:<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n The following entry went after the same joke but had the wrong chess piece speaking: <\/span>\u201cTechnically, I\u2019m not responsible for any of my actions.\u201d<\/i><\/b> Joel Mishon attempted to defend that caption on the grounds that the knight may actually have been talking, but he was wrong. As for the \u201cmanipulated by an unseen hand\u201d entries that correctly identified the bishop as the one who\u2019s speaking, <\/span>\u201cYou expect us to believe you acted alone?\u201d<\/i><\/b> could have also referred to the knight\u2019s being part of a team. It works well either way. But the last entry was the best of the group because it alluded to the fact that many chess champions, including Garry Kasparov and Boris Spassky, have been Russian.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The following three entries did a good job of incorporating common chess terms:\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n This pun was OK: <\/span>\u201cYou have quite the checkered past.\u201d<\/i><\/b> But this one was far better: <\/span>\u201cWere you the knight in question?\u201d<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n This next entry suggests that the knight is the defendant in a criminal trial, as opposed to a witness, and that he has asserted a defense that the prosecutor is trying to characterize as wildly implausible: <\/span>\u201cYou expect us to believe that you have an exact twin?\u201d<\/i><\/b> It works because each chess team has two knights, but I wish the person who submitted that caption had substituted the word \u201cidentical\u201d for \u201cexact.\u201d No one talks about exact twins.\u00a0 Because identical twins have the same DNA, the \u201cevil twin\u201d defense is not as rare as one might assume. <\/span>See<\/span><\/i> Tim Geyser, \u201cWhy Identical twins Are a Nightmare for the Legal System,\u201d <\/span>VICE News<\/span><\/i>, January 1, 2021.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n As usual, I will end with a few captions that don\u2019t fit neatly into any category:<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n Congratulations to ABBY SIEGEL, who won the contest with, <\/span>\u201cYou expect us to believe you have an exact twin?\u201d<\/i><\/b> The five runners-up are:<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n <\/p>\n If you who want to see how we made our selections, we recorded the process with Bob Eckstein and posted it below<\/p>\n\n
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Watch the Judging Process<\/h3>\n
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