Category Archives: Seal Barks

Adam and Drew, Pt. 2: A Cartoon Caption Contest Interview

In which Cartoon Caption Contest champ Adam Szymkowicz answers the Derwent Drawing Pencil-sharp questions of master cartoonist (and professional carver of headstones) Drew Dernavich. Szymkowicz’s questions and Dernavich’s answers will follow in the next few days.

Adam:

Congratulations on winning The New Yorker‘s Cartoon Caption Contest. You’re now the proud owner of a unique collaborative piece of artwork, and you will of course need to protect it by buying the Extended Warranty from me. I’ll have my people contact your people. Until then, a few questions:

Have you ever been caught with a clip-on tie?

How long did it take you to come up with the caption?

If I had drawn the parrot speaking, what might it have been saying?

Who is your favorite cartoonist, New Yorker or otherwise (think carefully about this one, Adam…)?

Are you considering a career as a cartoonist, or is this a one-off for you?

I see that you’re involved with the visual arts. What other kind of art are you interested in? What kind of art inspires you?

As a fellow New Englander and a stone engraver, I have spent my share of time in Vermont. Tell me something that you find funny about Vermont.

Finally—what are your plans for the cartoon?

Congrats again and best wishes, Adam—

Drew Dernavich

Adam’s reply:

As far as I can see it, the clip-on tie is the most important safety device developed in the last thirty years. Did you know that since the introduction of the clip-on tie, accidental hanging-related deaths have dropped a remarkable 11% among regular tie wearers?

As for the caption, it was spawned out of the ether, in about twelve seconds. As long as it should feasibly take to envision a clip-on parrot.

If the parrot were to be speaking, the first thing I’d have to determine was whether the parrot was talking to another parrot, or to one of the businessmen. If the parrot were talking to another parrot I think he’d have to be saying “Well, where’d you get yours?” If it was speaking to the businessmen it would have to be saying “Awk! Don’t worry, it’s on the company card! Awk!” or something of that nature.

My favorite cartoonist is a toss-up between Bill Watterson and Gary Larson. I grew up on “Calvin and Hobbes” and “The Far Side”—I think it shows.

I’d love to be a cartoonist, except I can’t draw. I have the artistic talent of an Ikea coffee table. Maybe less. However, this does not mean that I can’t enjoy art. I really am driven by cartoons, from the old “Looney Tunes” and “Acme Hour” that I used to watch at my grandmother’s house. Something about the Coyote’s unattainable quest for the Roadrunner just gets me. I also have a deep love for all things literary, and am constantly inspired by the classics (Kerouac, Melville, Cheever, among billions of others), and by new writers that I hear about word-of-mouth or through some of the newer literary mags (McSweeney’s, Vestal Review, Black Warrior, etc.).

Something funny about Vermont…that’s tough. After you’ve lived somewhere long enough even the mundane becomes absurd. I’m not sure if this is all that funny, but it’s interesting to go walking through the fields near my house and see old foundations and ancient farming equipment. It really puts you in your place to see the land reclaiming that which was once used to cultivate it and bring it more into the sphere of man. Sorry, waxing mad philosophical. A slow place like Vermont gives you a lot of time for that sort of thing.

As for my plans for the cartoon…just you wait. It’s actually the first subtle step toward my eventual world takeover.

All right, my turn to ask questions:

So why parrots on businessmen’s shoulders, and what would you have had the parrot saying?

Who is your favorite cartoonist, and in line with that, how did you decide you wanted to be a cartoonist?

What’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever engraved on a headstone? What do you want engraved on yours?

What do you prefer, boxers or briefs?

If you were given a shovel in a public place, by someone you didn’t know, what would your first instinct be?

You have ten words to describe yourself, they all must begin with the letter “T”…ready, get set, go!

Finally, if you were given the choice, would you rather de-pants a bear (assuming bears wore pants) and immediately be mauled, or would you rather be mauled by a bear, knowing that in the future (after you healed) you would be able to de-pants it without injury? Why?

Good luck, keep up the awesome cartoons, and enjoy answering these questions.

Your friend and fan,

Adam Szymkowicz

P.S. Who are these “people” you’re talking about? Are there people watching me?! Are you in on it?!

Update: Dernavich replies.

***

Other Emdashes caption-contest interviews:

  • David Kempler, winner #100 (“Don’t tell Noah about the vasectomy.”)
  • David Wilkner, winner #99 (“I’d like to get your arrow count down.”)
  • Richard Hine, winner #98 (“When you’re finished here, Spencer, we’ll need you on the bridge-to-nowhere project.”)
  • Carl Gable, winner #40 (“Hmm. What rhymes with layoffs?”)
  • T.C. Boyle, winner #29 (“And in this section it appears that you have not only alienated voters but actually infected them, too.”)
  • Evan Butterfield, winner #15 (“Well, it’s a lovely gesture, but I still think we should start seeing other people.”)
  • Jan Richardson, winner #8 (“He’s the cutest little thing, and when you get tired of him you just flush him down the toilet.”)
  • Roy Futterman, winner #1 (“More important, however, is what I learned about myself.”)

Clip-On Parrots and Doppelgangers

I just spoke with the good-natured, self-deprecating Adam Szymkowicz, winner of the most recent caption contest. “I was psyched to win. I’m finally known for something!” he laughed. He’s out West snowboarding at the moment, but happily agreed to do an email interview with cartoonist Drew Dernavich (whose cartoons he likes a lot) in coming days. Look for that soon.

I warned Adam that other contest winners have reported getting cantankerous letters from readers. “Uh-oh, I hope they don’t have anything against clip-on parrots!” Yes, about that caption: He wasn’t sure if it “was necessarily in the vein of The New Yorker,” he says, so he was extra-pleased it was chosen.

Meanwhile, he’s already contending with one of the drawbacks of fame: being impersonated. Another Adam Szymkowicz, a New York playwright and screenwriter (Pretty Theft, Deflowering Waldo), keeps getting congratulated for winning the contest. As our Adam reports, “we’ve had this little email thing going on for a couple of days.” From his jesting letter:

So you don’t know me…

But you have something of mine. My name. yeah, my name. Adam Szymkowicz. When I took it, hell, I thought no one else would want that lackadaisical jumble of consonants and just two and a half vowels. Apparently I was wrong…. [W]e’re gonna have to have it out over this shit at some point. It’ll be a total literary style high-noon showdown. Totally. OK corral style; complete with dust, blood, shotguns and scantily-clad prostitutes watching furtively from behind grimy half veiled upstairs saloon windows.

I like that half a vowel—it reminds me of an improv bit my friend Scott Prendergast did in which the letter Y showed up to rehearsal for Vowels—The Musical!, although he’d been told to come in only “sometimes.” In any case, as Caption Adam notes, “He put it on his blog, so I guess he’s not mad.” Emily Fox Gordon and I know well that having a name clone can be inconvenient, but it does have a big plus—it makes you seem really, really prolific. Congratulations to the new Szymkowicz in town, and don’t touch that dial; look for his dialogue with Drew Dernavich here soon. (Update: Real soon—these guys are prompt!) Come join the youth and beauty brigade!

***

Other Emdashes caption-contest interviews:

  • David Kempler, winner #100 (“Don’t tell Noah about the vasectomy.”)
  • David Wilkner, winner #99 (“I’d like to get your arrow count down.”)
  • Richard Hine, winner #98 (“When you’re finished here, Spencer, we’ll need you on the bridge-to-nowhere project.”)
  • Carl Gable, winner #40 (“Hmm. What rhymes with layoffs?”)
  • T.C. Boyle, winner #29 (“And in this section it appears that you have not only alienated voters but actually infected them, too.”)
  • Evan Butterfield, winner #15 (“Well, it’s a lovely gesture, but I still think we should start seeing other people.”)
  • Jan Richardson, winner #8 (“He’s the cutest little thing, and when you get tired of him you just flush him down the toilet.”)
  • Roy Futterman, winner #1 (“More important, however, is what I learned about myself.”)

(12.12.05 issue) Wunderkind wins caption contest

Surely, this recent St. Lawrence University graduate, writing tutor, and native of Shoreham, VT, is the same Adam Szymkowicz who’s just won the latest caption contest. (It’s the one with the corporate parrot meeting.) And won it, I should add, with a caption that’s as funny as the best of the entries so far. Although I’m happy to reach out to contest winners myself (hi, paranoid L.A. makeup artist! salut, charming other people!), I’m even happier when they contact me first. So, Adam, I’m looking forward to your email. I’m especially glad that his appropriately twentysomething-snappy caption—”Shut up, Bob, everyone knows your parrot’s a clip-on”—is paired with a Drew Dernavich drawing, since Dernavich is one of my favorites of the younger cartoonists at the magazine. These two New Englanders might well enjoy one another, and perhaps I can arrange that in a virtual sort of way.

The cheerful-looking and Frisbee-playing Adam is a visual artist himself; at least if I’m correct about his identity, he contributed to an experimental group show called Learning to Love You More in the North Country while he was still in school. Even more impressively, he’s written a caption that makes an already beautifully strange drawing even stranger. Like proper improv, a good caption like this does more than echo the immediate joke and doesn’t contradict the visual setup, either, but extends it by inventing a whole new weird world and set of relationships—in ten words. This was the right choice, although Radosh’s imps likely have their own preferences.

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Mankoff’s monster mash

From tomorrow’s Times:

At this moment, give or take a coffee break, researchers at the University of Michigan are working against time, or at least budget, to figure out how and why that most delightful of adaptive responses, laughter, took its place in the evolutionary pantheon alongside the appendix, opposable thumbs and lip gloss.

And if you think splitting the atom was hard, try cracking a joke and then isolating it into discrete psycholinguistic components. After all, levity, not gravity, holds it together, a reality Robert Mankoff is only too aware of. Mr. Mankoff, the cartoon editor of The New Yorker (its annual cartoon issue is on the newsstands now), fled a doctoral program in psychology in 1977 to become a cartoonist. Now he is an adviser to the Michigan study, which is scrutinizing minute facets of people’s reactions to the magazine’s cartoons from the last 79 years.

As befits his profoundly comic, comically profound mind-set, Mr. Mankoff has on his desk a statue of comedic inspiration. It is not a plaster bust of Groucho Marx or Shecky Greene but a plastic 12-inch likeness of that evergreen king of comedy, Godzilla. “He reminds me that I’m silly,” Mr. Mankoff said.

“The essence of humor is incongruity,” he said. That explains why Godzilla looks funny rampaging over the papers on his desk; and why Godzilla is so funny rampaging through a pitifully modeled Tokyo in myriad English-dubbed Japanese films with special effects that are barely a patch on the first monster movie: the 1925 dino-epic “The Lost World.” Even the fleeing hordes look like they are laughing.

“Sometimes I put him down on the street just to see how he looks,” Mr. Mankoff said. “Right now I am looking at a Harvard personality test to give to the cartoonists, but I was giving it to Godzilla. Like, No. 25: I have a clear set of goals and work toward them in an orderly fashion. Would he strongly agree or disagree? I think he’d agree. Or No. 36: I often get angry at the way people treat me. I’d say yes.” Continued.

NYer cartoonist has a blog

Well, more than one of them do, but here’s one I just noticed (thanks to L.C. for the tip!): What to Wear This Very Second, by cartoonist Emily Richards (that link is to her cartoons from the magazine). Elegant, colorful, genteel yet provocative:

Gentle Readers, let us start now: Be more strange. Dive off the slow barge of weather assessment and dog breed comparisons into deeper waters. Ask strangers startling questions, wear a fake nose to the grocery, do not go gentle into that good night wearing appropriate clothing. We must stop being so boring.

Amen to that. Richards also links to Marshall Hopkins’ blog; he’s another cartoonist at the magazine, and uses the blog to post some striking drawings.

People often ask me, So, so you like everything in The New Yorker? No, I do not. I usually like most of it. But not everything.

Lost the caption contest?

You may get another chance, if you go skiiing with captain Bob Mankoff and some of his team at Beaver Creek in January. From the Vail Daily News:

The event, slated for Jan. 6-8, will feature six cartoonists from The New Yorker magazine on a visit to Beaver Creek. The cartoonists are some of the magazine’s best-known, including Harry Bliss, Matt Diffee, Ed Koren, Bob Mankoff, Victoria Roberts and Jack Zeigler.

During the festival, the cartoonists will be on hand to entertain guests with cartoon renderings, host a breakfast, do classes for children, appear at cocktail parties and more. There will also be a captioning contest—similar to the one the magazine runs on its inside back page every week—where people will have the chance to win prizes by suggesting the best caption.

Just don’t let one of those Addams types try to rope you into a game of ski football. You’ll lose.

Memo to Mankoff: I looked for “Downhill Skier” on Cartoonbank, to no a-Vail! All I saw in my search was this Chast tribute to Addams, faithfully transcribed by the “Day-O”-savvy staff since the drawing is so small:

When I was a kid my parents and I used to escape the city and spend the summer up near Cornell University, in upstate New York. “Look! Trees!” “Smell! Fresh air!” A whole contingent of Brooklyn schoolteachers went up there, to take courses and attend lectures—for, as my mother put it, “a certain degree of intellectualism.” This group included a barely five-foot-tall science teacher whose tan and extremely bald head was overflowing with plans of how to get free stuff from corporations… “I told them the pudding didn’t jell and they sent me thirty boxes!” …a goatee, demonic-looking math teacher who was a compulsive punster and his pale, delicate wife with noticeably tiny feet… “Whatsamatter, you can’t see the forest for the cheese?” … a social-studies teacher who wore clothes she designed herself, like the skirt with plastic pockets that held removable snapshots of all her friends… “Millie Davenport is OUT.” …and a Spanish teacher with a dime-size birthmark in the middle of his forehead, as well as countless others. Anyway, on the Cornell campus was a browsing library. When my parents needed a little “intellectualism,” they’d park me in there. “Now, don’t move a muscle till we get back!” “Okey-dokey!” There were no kids’ books whatsoever, but there were tons of cartoon collections. I discovered Peter Arno, Helen Hokinson, George Price, Otto Soglow, and many more. But the books I was obsessed with were by Charles Addams: Monster Rally, Black Maria, Homebodies, Night crawlers, Drawn and Quartered…I laughed at everything that I knew I shouldn’t find funny: homicidal spouses; kids building guillotines in their rooms; and all those poor, unfortunate two-headed, three-legged, four-armed people. Wolcott Gibbs, in his introduction to Addams and Evil wrote that Addams’s work “is essentially a denial of all spiritual and physical evolution in the human race.” All in all, I’d have to agree. “Time to go!” “Did you miss us?”

Are images disappearing from the bank? Do you suspect notorious cat burglar Grace Kelly? Is there a rights problem with some of the old cartoons? As Gawker would say, developing.

Avast, ye corporate pirate jokes!

Daniel Radosh continues his genius, and wildly popular, parallel-universe caption contest by providing an alternate opportunity to complete this week’s Drew Dernavich cartoon. Dernavich’s drawings (he’s the one with the boldly lettered “Dd” signature) are always so beautiful they can stand alone without context or icing, but this one’s aflutter with possibilities. Read the Radosh fans’ absurd, inspired squawks, submit a few of your own, and send the plausible ones to Bob Mankoff. He needs them! Win and I’ll interview you—how’s that for incentive?

Coming attractions: The startling lessons of Shopgirl.