Caption/Anti-Caption

I enjoy Daniel Radosh’s New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest too much.

You’re familiar with it, I’m sure:  A reaction to the official New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest, Radosh simply posts each week’s cartoon on his site and lets his comments section do the talking.  People are encouraged to enter their least funny caption; the attempts to be un-funny are inevitably much funnier than the stabs at comedy official New Yorker entrants make.  (For his own explanation, go here; this week’s contest is here.)

If I were one to leave well-enough alone, I wouldn’t pay any attention to the thing.  A while back – several weeks before the Radosh contest, actually – I came up with my own default caption.  It was meant to be viral; I wanted anyone who ever picked up a New Yorker to see a cartoon and immediately think, “Go fuck yourself.”  I entered that in Radosh’s contest when he first started it, he gave it a special mention under the winners, linkage ensued, and that should have been that.

But it’s just so damned fun to get obscene and obnoxious all over those precious little pics.  Like this:

Or this:

I can’t help myself.  I’ve undermined my own concept.  Oh, well.

I was horrified when I went to his site last Monday and saw this, following a note that the New Yorker was skipping a week:

To ease your withdrawal symptoms, why not order tickets now for the February 7th Rejection Show, where I will be joining New Yorker cartoonist Matt Diffee for a presentation of rejected submissions to the actual contest and some highlights from the anti-contest. What most people don't know is that the cartoons used in the New Yorker contest are all originally submitted with captions for publication inside the magazine proper. My hope is that Matt will be willing to share some of these rejections too. Can they really be worse than what readers come up with?

We have a winner.  That’s surely the least funny caption ever fucking written.  I’m not a careful reader, so perhaps... we were meant to supply the cartoon?

Okay.  I figure it’d go something... a little... like this:

Yeah, my therapist is worried, too.  But doing this sort of made me long for the good old days...

Ah, that felt good.

*

Now, I’d meant to post that last week.  But it didn’t get drawn until yesterday.  Like I’ve said, I’m behind.  I’m sure y’all are waiting for that recap of November’s Satanicide concert with baited breath.  Priorities.  Etc.

Coincidentally, yesterday came all sorts of minor Gawker-inspired, Caption-centric brouhaha.  And I suppose I should acknowledge it simply to thank those folks – Lindsay and Dana and, yes, Radosh... along with other peoples who e-mailed and for whom I have no links – who supportively jumped up and down when the G-monster published this.

Yeah, they just loved that some guy repeatedly used the same profane caption on all the New Yorker entries, five months after I did the same thing.  Not that I think Modern Arthur was stealing an idea; why would anyone steal a joke with a repeating punchline?  That’s silly.  Making fun of New Yorker cartoons is a time-tested tradition –my entry is named after the caption in the Seinfeld episode that did so – and when mag-watcher Emdashes saw Gawker’s link she promptly mentioned several other cartoon parodies, including a McSweeney’s list from 2001 that exhausts the f-word long before I used it.  I’d never seen the McSweeney’s list, Art’d never seen mine.  Simple enough.

It’s amusing, though, that the web-worldly Gawker folks thought it was all new-and-shiny.  Not that they’d ever swing by my little corner on purpose – they’re a gossip sheet, after all – and when I first put that piece up last August, very very few people saw it.  But then Radosh highlighted it, and TMFTML nodded, and Adweek jumped on; you’d think the intrepid G’ker staff might’ve stumbled upon it as they aggressively scoured the net.  Why, the newshounds at Gothamist even found the Radosh contest three months after it started, and the first comment they got about their article was an anonymous link to me.  Not that anyone ever reads comments.

Anyway, M-Art did the noble thing and shared the G-love by linking to everyone who’s ever made fun of a New Yorker cartoon, including myself.  And nobody got hurt.

But thanks to all those folks who remembered my riff.  Not sure I’ve ever wanted to be remembered as the Go-Fuck-Yourself guy, but it’s nice to be remembered, all the same.

tags: gawker  new yorker caption contest  anti caption contest  

links: digg this    del.icio.us    reddit