Am I the only one who hates The New Yorker caption contest?
Every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday (with luck), the week’s issue of The New Yorker gets shoved into our mailbox. And when my kids come home, the first thing they’ll turn to when they see the mag is the back page.
There, for the uninitiated, is the Cartoon Caption Contest page. Which I loathe like little else.
I don’t know why it is. Maybe it’s the faux populism that the contest seems to exude. Here’s The New Yorker, letting all of its readers decide what the high-larious caption to the high-concept panel ought to be. It’s almost like being at the Algonquin Round Table — but more akin to yelling punchlines at George Kauffman from the next table.
In a more desperate way, the nightly TV newscast lets viewers send in pictures of cloud formations, and twitter/text their votes about whether taxes are bad or the home team is unbeatable. It’s the dialog that all established media now think will make them indispensable to people’s lives. The only problem is, most viewers can’t take a memorable picture, and most readers can’t write a caption.
Each week, a couple thousand captions are mailed in. Almost without fail, of the three finalists, one caption will be an execrable pun, one will be a play on words that takes three extra miles to get to its point (which wasn’t funny to start with), and one caption has close to the right tone — dry, multiple-layered, au courant but not cliché, and somewhat Gotham-y. By Gotham-y, I mean that it has to do with a stiff upper lip in the face of decay or danger or failure, or a smart-alecky retort that tries to wrangle the absurd to a mundane level. Anything that might refer to a shopping mall, fast food, an open space, a highway without gridlock, or Bass Pro Shops is never going to make it to the winner’s circle.
I’ve read that each of the cartoons used for the contest had already been submitted to the magazine by the cartoonist with a real caption. A caption they actually worked on and shaped with the writer’s innate skill of timing and economy. I’d really would like to know what that caption was. Whatever entries from readers are published might be close, or might be completely off-target, but I’ll never know exactly what the original caption was, and that makes me feel like I missed something. Maybe that makes me a snob, as if reading the magazine didn’t already accomplish that.
But as a professional writer and humorist, I’ve had too many instances of people in person and in print who work really really hard to prove that they are just as funny as me, even though I’ve never challenged them about it. Do people feel the need to show engineers that they know about torque and materials stress? Show dentists that they know how to administer Novocain?
It’s the whole “I crack everyone up at the board meetings — do you think I should try out as a stand-up comedian?” syndrome. If you have to ASK whether you should be a stand-up comedian, then you are sane, and ergo don’t have what it takes to be one. It’s the same with being a cartoonist. Someone is trying to make a living at it, while others are turning it into a parlor game. I feel bad for both sides.
Mostly, I fell bad reading those awful, awful puns.
Some readers out there might know that every Christmas for the past 20 years or so, I have attempted to write some kind of Yule-themed story for my wife. The first story I ever had published, entitled “Jerry’s Last Fare” in the late Chicago Tribune Magazine, was also the first I ever wrote as a gift to my wife. For better or worse, I took it as an omen.
It took me a while to get my e-books up on the system at Amazon, and then at Smashwords. It wasn’t that it was so all-fired complicated to do, although it took a few uploads before the layout and everything was to my satisfaction. It was easy enough to format for Kindle: All I had to do was convert it to an HTML document, and then follow their detailed instructions. Smashwords, which converts the books to the formats for Sony, Nook, iPad, and smart phones, as well as for their own sale, took a little more finessing with Word, but it was easy once I got the hang of it.
I love the idea of podcasts more than the actual things. They promise more than they actually deliver, they almost always need editing and truncating, and most importantly, I never have time to hear the whole thing. I sometimes wish I had to commute every day, so I could find some really good ones and, even more ambitiously, keep up with them. The ones I listen to have been piling up in my ipod like unread newspapers and copies of Atlantic and Money Magazine. There just aren’t enough hours in the day for them all.
Okay, I think I’ve reached it. I’ve finally had my fill of the Winter Olympics.
Also, I don’t know why this is, but I think everyone who is out competing in winter sports at any level just generally LOOKS good. Maybe it’s the lack of sweat, plus the lycra body suits that cover up the overstrained muscles enough so the athletes don’t look like lab experiments.
One reason I think I’m addicted to watching the Winter Olympics, especially the ski competitions, is that I miss “ABC’s Wide World of Sports.” Skiing was a regular feature on that show, and to a kid in Detroit the broadcast locales were exotic, like St Moritz and Squaw Valley and, yes, Whistler. That romantic aura still infects me when I go skiing, no matter how long the lift lines are, how expensive the food and lodging is, and how obnoxious the snowboarders are. 
Man, what a year. I can’t imagine anyone is very sad to see 2009 in the rearview mirror. Teabaggers, climate-change deniers, Balloon Boy, Octomom, vampires and zombies, Milton Bradley, Joe “Blow” Lieberman, and Wall Street bankers “doing God’s work”. Unemployment, foreclosures, swine flu, bankrupt companies, disappearing newspapers. “You Lie!” “Imo let you finish, but…” “Common sense solutions for America.” Yeesh, there might be something good to look back on, but I don’t have the stomach for it now.
An old friend just sent a good joke that is both about Christmas and about current affairs. Keep this one in your pocket to have handy at tasteful social affairs.