What Are You Laughing At?
Relax, honey—everybody gets buyer’s remorse.
Winning caption: Anisha S. Dasgupta, New Haven, Conn.
Drawing by Tom Cheney
From here
Ever since the New Yorker started its cartoon caption contest, I thought democracy had at last arrived in America. Everyone could be funny now! (Too bad of course for people like me who were unable to conjure a single funny thought when faced with the caption-less cartoon. We would need to be shipped off to unjust, unfair, undemocratic places like Iraq, or Cuba, or Florida.) In any case, I became one of those readers who’d pick up a new issue of the magazine only to see what the readers had sent in. I was–still am–delighted. Week after week.
Then, my dear colleague Judith Nichols began co-teaching a course at Vassar with New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donnelly. And, at the department’s annual party, I asked Liza what she thought of the readers’ captions. She hated them. Then, Judy and Liza organized a panel discussion on campus to which came other New Yorker cartoonists, including the peerless Roz Chast. All the panelists, in particular Peter Steiner, thought the whole idea stupid and very unfunny. There’s some sense of violation involved, it seems, and this kind of collaboration seems to these cartoonists dubious at best and farcical (in a bad way) at worst.
Tonight I came across an interview with Carl Gable of Norcross, Georgia who has now won three (!) of these caption contests. Please read it.
