Today’s Beaver County (PA) Times celebrates what’s probably the funniest caption so far in the new series, “It’s me, ‘9,’ from yoga class,” and its self-deprecating dentist author. The man lives in a town with “quip” right in the middle of it! Naturally he’s got the right stuff to win. Not to mention that Cafrelli spends most of his day looking at people upside down; that’s got to spark the imagination.

Aliquippa dentist Robert Cafrelli got published in the July 4 issue of the NEW YORKER magazine.

It wasn’t like pulling teeth or anything. Cafrelli just thought up six words, and viola, he was the winner of the erudite magazine’s cartoon caption contest.

“I just did it for fun,” said Cafrelli, who for his efforts wins an autographed copy of the cartoon for which he supplied words. While a framed copy might look good in his Sheffield Road dentist’s office, he said he probably will display the cartoon at home.

A New Yorker subscriber who appreciates the magazine’s articles on theater, nightclubs and sports, Cafrelli had been paying attention to the weekly cartoon caption contest, but at first none of the wordless cartoons moved him.

But a cartoon showing a woman shaped like a No. 6 “kind of spoke to me,” said Cafrelli, who figures his brevity helped his caption win. “It was short and right to the point,” he said.

Sports? Like this week’s Kevin Conley piece on young and restless poker champs? It’s a pretty good story, actually, though I get bored by cards very quickly. My favorite fact is that poker ace Jennifer Harman, who (writes Conley) “may be the best female poker player anywhere in the world,” has almost the same name as Beth Harmon, world chess champion in a better place than this one. Jennifer Harman, who gets insufficient coverage in the piece, is a celebrated poker beauty as well as a gifted player and dogged survivor of two kidney transplants. Much as I love Gahan Wilson, his caricature of Harman makes her look more Middle Earth than Smart Olsen Twin. Poke her, indeed. In any case, even if you can’t focus on the details of Texas hold-’em, you’ll like Conley’s Word Freak-ish approach (without the personal learning curve, though that may be in the probable future book).

Mid-piece and especially in the following story on Guantánamo Bay, I also decided I don’t love the all-by-one-guy spots. I love the spot artists, but not the running Story in the Spots. I’m finding they not only distract the eye from the text in a new way but are oddly insulting to it. I’l explain this more clearly another time, when I finally post that Times piece about the Spot Revolution. I also miss the old, odd, random spots. I don’t like change in my traditions. Anyway, congratulations, Dr. Cafrelli! Can I have the bubble-gum fluoride this time?

Local guy deep 6’s New Yorker contest [Beaver County Times; includes Koren’s drawing plus Cafrelli’s caption]

Categories: NYer, Issue, Cartoons, Contest, Spots

You know the clown-date drawing whose caption entries are being judged as we speak? From the consistently excellent and entirely representative Overheard in New York, here’s what the clown said right before she dumped him:

Guy: So, I went on this audition, and they asked me, “Can you juggle and ride a unicycle?” I mean, I can juggle, and I can ride a unicycle, but I can’t do both at once, I’m not a skills clown. Basically, my skill is falling. I can fall really well.

Categories: NYer, Cartoons, Contest

The Portland, OR Tribune continues the tradition of local coverage of hometown cartoon heroes:

Local documentary filmmaker Eric Slade has won a New Yorker magazine cartoon caption contest. It’s a drawing of a business exec rushing out of his office with a surfboard under his arm, hollering to his secretary: “Tell my one-thirty things got way gnarly.” … There was no prize money, says Eric, but he’s getting lots of phone calls from people he hasn’t heard from in a long time.

What Slade (check out what I’m assuming are his interesting-looking films here and here) is modestly leaving out is his signed print of the David Sipress drawing, which is worth much, much more than mere money. As for the current contest, I’m afraid it’s one of those barren weeks without much to inspire effusion. #1, “Try telling that to the Kansas Board of Education” (Bob Schwartz of Cincinatti) is one of those editorial-commentary picks that have been popping up in the contest from time to time, so topical they won’t date well. #2, “Simple. I just wear my pants backward,” by Don Hailman of Wheaton, Ill., is disquieting and I can’t endorse it. I don’t think, although it’s been many years since I reviewed Defining New Yorker Humor, that it really qualifies. And #3, “What’s more important, youthful hair or F.D.A. approval?” by Rachel Kirkwood of Lexington, Ky., is funny—my pick—but also distressingly typical in that there’s a phrase, “youthful hair,” that I don’t think anyone outside an ad agency or maybe the goofy new MTV show The 70s House would ever use. Aside from that, though, Kirkwood’s caption is timely without being over-specific, inventive, and tells a whole silly story in eight short words. Well done. Vote now.

Since we are still in Kansas at the moment, Dorothy, read my pal Ben Adler’s fascinating roundup of actual conservatives’ opinions about evolution in TNR. For instance, the NYT‘s John Tierney: Whether he personally believes in evolution: “I believe that the theory of evolution has great explanatory powers.” Tucker Carlson: “I think God is probably clever enough to think up evolution.”

Categories: Cartoons, Contest, NYer, Issue

As predicted, Robert Cafrelli’s hilariously almost-kinky caption, “It’s me, ‘9,’ from yoga class,” has won Contest #6. As for #7, a Danny Shanahan drawing that almost needs no caption (here, with others—the new contest-history interface, though generally convenient, still isn’t perfect), I don’t think I can resist entering it, since as my friends are happy to remind me in gleeful detail, I dated two registered clowns in my less circumspect days. One was a famed polyamorist with a very small bicycle, the other a sozzled tunesmith well ahead of his time (he said). Both perfectly acceptable people at the end of the day, but I don’t think I’ll go for three. As for the current contest (the Victoria Roberts drawing of a woman on the phone and a tiny man in a fishbowl), it’s a toss-up. I like the second, “We decided on separate vacations this year,” by Ronald Katz of Potomac, Md., but I’m going to go for “He’s the cutest little thing, and when you get tired of him you just flush him down the toilet,” by Jan Richardson of Ridgeland, Miss. If you pick the first, you’ll probably also be wanting some of my clown contact info. I won’t give you the satisfaction, though.

Update: The information superhighway never sleeps, so there are already some clown-cartoon caption ideas ideas forming out there. Squeeze into the funny car, but be sure to submit under the Big Top too.

cartoon in the L.A. Weekly is here. Once you get used to his bleakly angular handwriting replacing the New Yorker caption type, you’ll be glad you have more BEK than you expected.

Categories: BEK, Cartoons, Extracurriculars

The fortunately unstoppable McSweeneysification of the magazine continues, or vice versa, as gold medalist Roy Futterman has a little affectionate fun with the genre:

FUTURE WINNERS
OF THE NEW YORKER CARTOON
CAPTION CONTEST.

By Roy Futterman

“You are doing something unusual, Harold!”

“I certainly am in a bar with other businessmen.”

“This desert island is a bummer.”

“I love being wealthy in the Hamptons.”

“I’m saying a cliché in a different context, Pam.”

“Boy, I sure do like intercourse.”

“I’m thinking something incongruous to what I’m doing.”

“Wanda, we are doing some nutty things in this picture!”

McSweeney’s [Main page]

Categories: NYer, Cartoons, McSweeney’s

I’ve been meaning to post this all week. Why the Baltimore Sun jumped on the caption-contest story and our local Newsday only just reprinted it is like a unicorn in the garden—mysterious, but not unwelcome. There’s an ostensible hook in local runner-up Paul Zinder, but it’s really just an excuse to write about the magazine, which…I understand. The piece is jauntily written by Rob Hiaasen. As you know, I don’t normally post entire articles, but this one is so nicely reported I think it should be read as a whole. Note the standing Mankoff offer of a ten-spot if you find a cartoon that didn’t make it into the grand anthology; he’s been saying this since the book came out. Readers, your mission, if you choose to accept it.

So, two dinosaurs are merrily munching citizens of some metropolis. Gobbling people like microwave popcorn, and one dinosaur says to the other…

Well, what does it say?

So, there’s a business meeting being held in a New York City subway car and the one CEO says to the others…

OK, this is hard. One more.

A woman meets a man on the street. He’s carrying a briefcase. He’s shaped like the number 6. Smiling, he says to her…

Maybe it’s not so easy writing witty captions to New Yorker cartoons. The heavy humor lifting had been left to the staff for much of the magazine’s 80-year history. But now, with history recorded by anyone with a blog and music broadcast by any contestant on a reality TV show, people expect anyone can write a funny line or two under a silly cartoon.

“We live in a more democratic entertainment age,” says the magazine’s cartoon editor, Robert Mankoff. Why can’t someone be a caption writer? “Everybody thinks they are a newspaperman, too.”

Capitalizing on its popular franchise, The New Yorker has expanded its annual “Cartoon Caption Contest”, which began in 1998, to a weekly back-page feature. Readers used to have just one shot a year at greatness; greatness, as defined in this literary circle, is receiving a signed print of the cartoon and getting your name in the magazine.

Now, The New Yorker publishes a weekly cartoon caption for consideration, for which readers submit suggested captions. The staff picks three finalists from the submissions, prints them and, in a feature befitting American Idol, readers vote online for their favorite caption. The winner is then printed in a subsequent issue. It’s become quite a production. Now that the contest is under way, every week features three cartoons in various stages of being captioned.

More than 50,000 people have entered captions since April—or between 7,000 and 12,000 each week. “Not only do a significant number of people think they are funny—they actually are funny,” says Mankoff.

Paul Zinder thought he was funny. He probably is.

Zinder, a 34-year-old film professor from Westminster, came close to greatness last month. Call him the Bo Bice of the “Cartoon Caption Contest” in the magazine’s May 30 issue. The cartoon was those two dinosaurs scarfing down a tasty populace. Zinder, who spent all of two minutes staring at the cartoon, wrote: “Pass me a beer truck.” It was good enough to make him a finalist and he didn’t even have to sing “Sweet Home Alabama.”

But the winning caption was submitted by David Markham, a dentist in North Carolina. A funny dentist! Who knew? His entry: “Remember that time you made me laugh and people came out of my nose?”

“I think it’s very witty. My friends and I actually predicted it would win. It was more New Yorker-like than mine,” says Zinder, who is spending the year in Italy teaching film at the American University of Rome. He reads his favorite magazine online and plans to enter more caption contests. He has a taste for it now.

“I’ve been a finalist once,” Zinder says. “I’m not going to give up.”

To his credit, “Pass me a beer truck” avoided the common traps the nonprofessional caption writer falls into, Mankoff says. First, Zinder kept it short. And he didn’t try to combine elements or overthink the cartoon.

His entry also fell neatly into one of the magazine’s “humor constituencies.” In weeding through entries, the staff files them by category—such as clever, poignant and aggressive. Zinder’s caption was clever. The winning entry, on the other hand, was poignant. Who doesn’t look back fondly on the days when a friend made you laugh and milk came out of your nose?

Because reading 12,000 captions a week would render them all tragically unfunny, Mankoff relies on these humor constituencies and classifications. He also really needs his computer. He has programmed it to sort entries by “comic domains”—such as “most commonly used phrases.” Contrary to our right-brained egos, humans often respond to cartoons in similar ways.

The magazine recently asked readers to write a caption to a cartoon showing two people in bed with the Earth—not the moon—appearing in the night sky. Hundreds of readers responded with some variation of “So, the earth really did move.” Readers also tend to be in sync with the cartoonists, who have already written their own.

“The interesting thing is that in every single instance, the real caption is one of the captions people thought of,” Mankoff says, with maybe just a word or two changed.

In the May 9 issue, “First, you must gain their trust” was a finalist for a cartoon depicting a lab researcher wearing a mouse suit while taking notes on a group of caged mice. Cartoonist Mike Twohy’s caption was “First, you must earn their trust.” Close enough.

Voters, however, chose “More important, however, is what I learned about myself” as the winning caption. It wasn’t the staff’s pick, and the thought had crossed one creative mind to override the online tallies.

“These are just numbers here. Who’s going to know?” Mankoff jokes. “We decided to be completely ethical.”

The New Yorker is full-throttle in this cartoon business, with cartoon T-shirts, coasters, calendars and themed cartoon books (lawyers, dogs, politicians and, of course, drinking cartoons). Mankoff, a longtime cartoonist himself, assembled the magazine’s first “bank” of cartoon inventory. Last year, The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker was published—all 68,647 of them. “Still, I’m haunted by the possibility that we missed one,” wrote Mankoff, the book’s editor. “So there’s ten bucks for anyone who can find any cartoon that we missed.”

The bet remains unclaimed.

Readers of The New Yorker are characteristically a literary and durable bunch. It requires endurance to tackle the magazine’s long fiction and investigative journalism. This isn’t to suggest John Updike, Susan Orlean or Seymour Hersh should slash their word counts. It’s just the longer pieces are one reason New Yorkers tend to pile up; most people haven’t accrued enough vacation time to finish some issues.

Given the magazine’s imposing depth, it’s no wonder many readers first flip to the cartoons. They want their dessert before the meal. And given this “democratic entertainment age,” no wonder thousands of people each week think they can write the best caption to
cartoons that puzzle and even paralyze lesser readers.

So, we now know what the businessman said to the others in the New York City subway car during their meeting. “This is my stop. Phil, you’ll be C.E.O. till Sixty-third Street,” wrote the winning writer, Lewis Gatlin—again of North Carolina.

But what did the man shaped as the number 6 say to the woman? The finalists have been chosen, and the magazine will announce the winner in its July 4 issue. But we vote today for the entry by Robert Cafrelli of Pennsylvania:

“It’s me, ‘9’ from your yoga class.”

You know, I don’t think I’m a newspaperman, except in very private moments you’d probably rather not hear about, but that’s my only quibble. As for 9 from yoga class (devilishly good, and my favorite as well), they’re still counting the votes at press time. As for funny dentists, it would be a mistake to discount the vengeful Orin Scrivello, D.D.S. (Steve Martin) and the tuneful Dr. Joe Kitchell (Bernie West, from—once again—Bells Are Ringing), simply because they’re fictional.

One Day Their Prints May Come [Newsday, via Baltimore Sun; nice hed, anonymous former colleague!]

Categories: NYer, Cartoons, Mankoff

Cartoon fan, eh? You and these New Yorker artists are in the same boat. That is, you could be:

Cartoonist Sam Gross has mixed feelings about the cruise he’ll take in September.

On the one hand, he’s looking forward to the opportunity to discuss his craft with an interested audience. Gross is one of a half-dozen cartoonists for The New Yorker featured on three Celebrity line “cartoon cruises” offered this year.

“I do well interacting with people at bookstores and lectures and so forth,” says Gross. “I’m pretty fast on my feet.”

On the other hand, there’s the seasickness issue.

“On two occasions, I’ve contemplated suicide, and both of them were on boats,” he says with a sour laugh. “I’m not crazy about boats, I’ll tell you that.”

The cartoonist, who signs his work “S. Gross,” will share a seven-night cruise, beginning Sept. 24, with his colleague George Booth. New Yorker cartoonists Jack Ziegler and Victoria Roberts will be featured on a cruise beginning Sept. 17, with Danny Shanahan and Matthew Diffee on one that departs Oct. 1.
…
Gross, 71, began selling cartoon ideas to The New Yorker in 1964. Many of those early ideas actually were drawn by the legendary Charles Addams of The Addams Family fame.

A few years later, the magazine began buying Gross’ cartoons, too.

One of his most famous efforts is a 1983 cartoon that shows a cow jumping over the moon. A bull, looking on, confides to a calf, “Your mother is a remarkable woman.”
…
At 62, cruising cartoonist Jack Ziegler isn’t much younger than Gross. Yet he represents a different generation of New Yorker artists.

Gross’ sophisticated-gag approach and raffish style are a link to the magazine’s golden age. But Ziegler is one of a small handful of cartoonists (Roz Chast is another) who, in the 1970s, began pulling the publication into a more modern world.

To at least one person within the magazine, however, he was pulling too hard.

When Ziegler began selling cartoons to The New Yorker, they would never actually appear in the magazine. He mentioned that to the cartoon editor, who investigated the situation.

“It turns out that Carmine Peppe,” the man who laid out the magazine, “was shuffling them all to the bottom of the pile,” Ziegler recalls. “He felt that I was bringing down the standards of the magazine with this type of eccentric humor.” Keep rowing…

If I were choosing, I’d go with Victoria Roberts in September (the schedule and, mmm, pricing are here). Although Sam Gross is the genius behind the cartoon that even now sits in a small frame here at Emdashes Central: “I don’t care if she is a tape dispenser. I love her.”

Drawing a crowd: With `New Yorker’ cartoonists as part of the crew, Celebrity is hoping to lure the sophisticated set out to sea. [Jay Boyar, Orlando Sentinel]
On the SEASIDE—Cartoon-a-Day Desk Calendar for Cruisers [About.com]
Thankful for: Good Design! [The Rake’s Progress. “Carmine Peppe was the legendary layout editor at the New Yorker, one of its great unsung heroes. For more than fifty years, he was responsible for the incredibly delicate craft of space shimming, not unlike a master carpenter.”]

Fans of painter Gretchen Dow Simpson, and there are many, know that she’s fascinated by architectural details: the zigzag play of light across a clapboard wall, for example, or the crisply minimalist lines of a classic New England farmhouse…. The new studio should provide plenty of room for Simpson to display her 2005 Pell Award, which she is to receive Friday at the annual awards ceremony and fundraiser sponsored by Trinity Repertory Company.
…
Now 66 (“and proud of it,” she says), Simpson is best know known for the cover illustrations she produced for the The New Yorker magazine between 1974 and 1995. During that period, her pared-down views of New England architecture appeared more than 60 times on the The New Yorker‘s cover—a remarkable run for an artist who dropped out of the Rhode Island School of Design after only two years.

“Basically, there was a lot of pressure from home,” she says. “Part of it was financial, since I had younger siblings at home who also wanted to go to college. Plus, I don’t think my parents really relished the idea of having an Abstract Expressionist painter for a daughter.”

After leaving RISD in 1959, Simpson got married and spent most of the next decade raising a family. Then, in 1974, she got a call from the The New Yorker‘s newly hired art director, Lee Lorenz, who had seen some of the cover illustrations Simpson had been submitting, on and off, since the mid-1960s.

“He told me that he liked the abstract stuff I was doing, but that it didn’t really fit what the magazine was looking for,” Simpson recalls. “He suggested trying something more realistic, but still with an abstract ‘feel.’ “

As for what Simpson should paint, Lorenz said simply: “Paint what you like.”

“Artistically, that was the big ‘aha’ moment,” Simpson says. “I started thinking: What do I really like? What do I want to paint? Eventually, I realized that having grown up in Cambridge [(Mass.)], I really liked New England architecture.”

Painter Simpson among Pell Award winners [Providence Journal]
Gretchen Dow Simpson covers [New Yorker Store]
New Yorker covers [Gretchen Dow Simpson]
“Block Island I” and “Nova Scotia II” [Nan Mulford Gallery]

Categories: NYer, Covers

I really like Kurt Andersen’s story on the new Doonesbury book in today’s Times Book Review. I too have a clear memory of Garry Trudeau’s intro to John Kerry (“You’re really clicking tonight, you gorgeous preppy”) from my mother’s copy of the book, which came out the year I was born (1971) but which became a useful meta-history text anyway. Since there was no Vietnam unit till college and I was as un-prone to watching foxhole footage as a girl child can be, good thing I had the complete set of Doonesbury volumes to teach me about hand grenades, Phred, radio journalism, university presidents, Nixon in China, weed, quarterbacks, Gay Talese, and portable typewriters. Anyway, I think Andersen’s off about just one little thing:

Another significant difference between ”Doonesbury” and all the other ”political” strips, from ”Pogo” to ”Shoe” to ”Mallard Fillmore,” is that Trudeau’s characters are not talking animals but human beings. The stakes and daily writerly challenge seem inherently greater. For their first 15 years of existence, the characters in ”Doonesbury” were like the Simpsons (and nearly every other comic-strip character in history except those in ”Gasoline Alley”): they were ageless. When Trudeau entered middle age himself, he started letting his creations grow older—and then promptly took an almost two-year hiatus. That could have turned into his shark-jumping moment, when the familiar rules of his fictional universe were overturned in a reckless bid for new juice. But instead of jumping the shark, which is born of boredom or creative bankruptcy, Trudeau actually raised his stakes some more. His characters graduated from college, got married, had children (who became characters themselves), got divorced, died. The strip became more ambitious, not less.

Leaving aside for a moment the possibility that “jumping the shark” may now be jumping the shark itself, how about “Sally Forth”? Don’t those characters age? I haven’t read the funny pages for a while, since I prefer my newspapers in crazy-salad form here on the information superhighway, but I have a distinct memory of that teenager as a baby. In any case, who knew the guy who writes “SF” had a witty, nicely designed blog? Well, he (Francesco Marciuliano) does, and it’s called Drink at Work. Carol Hartsell contributes good stuff as well. (Greg Howard was the original creator of the strip; Craig Macintosh draws the strip now.) Read some letters by Sally-haters, and either chortle or weep, depending. And call me ill-travelled, but the site has one of the coolest link-arranging concepts I’ve ever seen. Marciuliano also writes sharp political commentary on, for example, a bad cartoonist’s Terri Schiavo strips, and I don’t know why it should amaze me that he takes strong stands; it’s not as though his comic is supposed to be unbiased. Cue Intrepid Sketcher: The Garry Trudeau Story again. My God, that man ages well!

Stop the presses—I was thinking of For Better or For Worse, which I read every day in high school in the Chicago Tribune along with the honorable Dave Barry. Not only do the characters age, they have specific birthdates, years and all. Here’s the family tree. While “For Better…” isn’t exactly “Pogo” (nothing is), it’s still a popular strip. And now you have Drink at Work to add to your bookmarks. No, you don’t get to have a drink at work, because it’s the weekend, remember?