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.
Odd. I find the reader-submitted captions usually as funny as the actual cartoonist-written captions. And by “funny” I mean “wry.” I don’t experience more than one guffaw in a dozen cartoons and, more than not, that guffaw actually comes from the caption contest. (Still, the New Yorker is immeasurably funnier than the “funnies” pages of most newspapers, which, Gary Larson apart, seem to be stuck in the 1950s. Who laughs at this stuff?)
I wonder, what’s twisting the professionals’ knickers? They of all people shouldn’t be so humorless about this thing. More to the point, I’d have hoped that they’d be more open to the workings of the collective unconscious, how life can give the image to one, and the punch line to another.
God shares his gifts, you sad clowns.
Comment by Teju — December 12, 2006 @ 10:53 am
I want to clarify what Ami said….I don’t hate the captions that readers send in. Sometimes they are as good, if not better that ours. But I don’t like the concept. It makes what we do seem less of an art form. Do they have a “Title this poem” contest? “End this short story” contest? I don’t know, maybe I’m being stuffy. I have gotten reactions from people who remark on how difficult it is to write the captions, so…. What we do is not as easy as make a drawing and put words to it. Maybe that’s what I object to, that it makes what we do seem trivial. No disrespect intended on my part! I know there are TONS of funnier people out there than me, people who are not professional humorists! As E.B. White wrote, “The world decorates its poets with laurels and its wags with Brussel sprouts….” (I am paraphrasing because I am too lazy to go look it up for the exact quote). Humorists get no respect.
Comment by Liza Donnelly — February 7, 2008 @ 11:24 am