The Columnist Manifesto

In the world of alternative New Yorker cartoon captioning, I'm a mere amateur. First of all, I hadn't realized this, but it turns out you can see (and enter) the contest online, here.

What's more, Radosh.net has for some time been running "The New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest." Read the contest rules and inaugural entry here. From there, go to the index, which has several weeks worth of contests.

The anti-captions range from dumb or crude to much funnier than the real captions. Daniel Radosh himself comes up with some of the best captions as "starters." Here's a taste:

"Excuse me, you dropped your briefcase."

"No, fuck you and the horse you rode in on."

(Captions courtesy of Radosh.)

I have to add two new guidelines to the process of brainstorming about captions:

1) try to come up with an anti-caption -- a pointedly unfunny but fitting caption to the drawing. You'll find that near misses can be very funny.

2) avoid the formula of acheiving unfunniness by describing the drawing itself.

For instance, take this one:



You wouldn't caption it with something like: "Those damned floodlights have made my pupils disappear!" I mean you could, but it's too obvious.

I doff my cap to the witty blog, I hate the New Yorker, which features a running critique of various parts of the magazine and led me to both the online caption and anti-caption contests.

UPDATE: Check out Linney's caption for the above drawing in the comments. And how could I forget the anti-captions at Peroxide Comics?