Some pretty funny entries by this guy from the first (Squiddy the Chef) cartoon caption contest:

Here’s my entry: “I can’t in good conscience recommend the hand rolls tonight.”

My runners-up:

“Well, the tuna never takes it personally. Try that.”

“Yes, ever since we were kids. Honestly, he hasn’t given it much thought.”

“Work release program. It was either this, or menace the shipping lanes.”

“Extra wasabi? Won’t make much difference either way.”

“The special requires real teamwork to bring to the table.”

As he says, “I’m planning to submit an entry each week until I’m asked to ‘please stop doing that.’ ” Now, that’s the kind of attitude I like. I’m officially supporting Matt Shobe to win the next contest. If a bribery opportunity becomes available, I’ll take it. And for the love of Pete (or in this case, Leo—no, not the NYer‘s fair Leo Carey; sorry girls, he’s taken), don’t forget to vote today in the current contest! In case you’ve forgotten already, here’s my endorsement.

And if you want to be more like Matt here, put your thinking cap on and enter the current contest. I can hear you right now; you’re whining, But I just like making sour little quips with my friends all day long on the internet—I don’t like exposing myself like that! That is lame. (Here’s an upsetting account of cartoon caption contest writers’ block.) Both contests expire at the stroke of midnight tonight, so go. If you need more inspiration, here’s an interview with Dan Heath, the winner of the squid contest: “The mystery of the cartoon is: doesn’t he see how wrong it is? He’s selling out his own kind! I got really worked up about it. It’s like a little morality play with tentacles.” See, he’s a famous man now! This could be you!

The Squid Stays in the Picture [Q. & A. with cartoonist Alex Gregory, New Yorker]
Cartoon Charisma: Capturing the Moment [Boston Phoenix]
New Yorker State of Mind [Eye’s Guy Leshinski, on the contest]

Categories: NYer, Cartoons, Contest

Howard Hampton’s review in the Voice of The R. Crumb Handbook, which I for one am dying to get my hands on:

The first reaction to The R. Crumb Handbook, a rich and densely compacted anthology cum memoir cum mulch-heap scrapbook: finally, Huck Finn’s voraciously dysfunctional answer to The Boy Scout Handbook. If, that is, Huck had been a four-eyed antiquarian Catholic schoolboy geek adrift in 1950s suburbia, randomly sopping up the works of Harvey Kurtzman, Carl Barks, and Walt Kelly. Hey, kids, learn to draw dirty pictures—”It’s so simple even a child can do it”—and become an international cargo-cult treasure… Keep on readin’.

I’ve been storing up a lot of Crumb goodies for some imaginary Crumb post to end all Crumb posts, which I think is biting off more than I can chew. So I’ll just toss them out like…oh, well, crumbs, now and then hereafter. By the way, ever since the film, I always think of the magazine Leg Show (link safe for work—it wasn’t easy) when I think of Crumb, since there’s a scene in which he watches a photo shoot there. Leg Show! Aren’t humans weird? I like that about humans—even when I think I hate them as a group, I have to love that they’re so susceptible to their own perverse creations. And I love that Crumb has never been afraid to shine the big flashlight right on that weakness. It makes me like people more, not less, when I see his drawings. That’s art I can respect.

One more yummy snack: From this superb 1980 piece about Roz Chast by Don Shewey, which I somehow missed in my Chast hosanna, this very relevant fact:

Chast’s style of humor is not, needless to say, the house brand at the New Yorker, home of Charles Addams’ macabre sight gags, George Booth’s shiftless hound dogs and Edward Koren’s psychobabbling fuzzy-wuzzies. Compared to the New Yorker‘s typically representational, punchline-oriented cartoonists (lovable old friends or stodgy old farts, depending on your point of view), Chast is a downright radical.
…
Roz Chast is from Brooklyn, where her parents (a high school teacher and assistant principal, both retired) still live. She started cartooning when she was very young—”I used to draw this strip called ‘Jacky and Blacky’ that was, God, really dumb”—but her first big influence was, not surprisingly, R. Crumb. Crumb definitely stylized the visual imagination of ’60s youth, particularly the ones who helped make marijuana a multimillion dollar industry, and he spawned a whole school of slavish imitators. Some of Crumb’s stoned humor creeps into Chast’s work, although she claims to drawn under the influence of nothing stronger than rapidograph fumes; her signature—”R. Chast”—is perhaps an unconscious hommage to Crumb.

I’d like to see a show with their drawings intermingled. I’ve already claimed that Chast is sexier than people often think, and Crumb more romantic. I am the demographic for that show. Though I’m a poet and tend to believe I might be a solo speck in the universe without company or solace, surely I’m not alone on this one.

Naked Lunchbox [VV]
Detail of R. Crumb’s Sept. 28, 1998 New Yorker cartoon mentioning Tensegrity [Sustained Action]
Robert Crumb [great interview transcript, Guardian, UK]
R. Crumb at the New York Public Library [Boing Boing; funny excerpt from the book]
Crumb Products [official R. Crumb website; sells stuff incl. “Belly Button Comix” by Sophie Crumb]
Household is a Roz Chast Word [Soho News, via Don Shewey. Fun quote: “Any wild stories about the New Yorker? Roz Chast’s Secret Life with John Updike? “Hey, Updike, Salinger—Salinger and I were like that.” She holds up two fingers together. “Thurber! I knew Thurber before he died.” She holds up two fingers apart. “We were more like that.”]

It’s that time again already—to vote in the next cartoon caption contest. Think of it as the Kentucky Derby, but you get to choose which horse—Adrian Zanchettin, Tom Szidon, or Lewis Gatlin—is fastest. On your marks…get set…go! Here are the captions—you’ll have to look at the drawing to choose properly.

“Frank called to say he’ll be late—he’s stuck at the office.”
Submitted by Adrian Zanchettin, New York, N.Y.

“Yes, I do miss the corporate jet. I miss the corporate jet very much.”
Submitted by Tom Szidon, Chicago, Ill.

“This is my stop. Phil, you’ll be C.E.O. till Sixty-third Street.”
Submitted by Lewis Gatlin, Elizabeth City, N.C.

Of course, as with last week, the choice is obvious, though again there’s a decent second that only just misses the mark. #1 wrote itself with a piece of software called Obvious Gag. It’s not that it’s a complete dud, but it’s flat; it doesn’t fizz. #2 is as ingenious as the grouping of consonants in Szidon’s name, but it would be funnier if one of the employees were saying it rather than the boss. I really admire it, though. #3 is the best. It takes the simple part of the joke and makes it into a whole universe, with its own logic. That’s why Lewis Gatlin has my vote, and, I hope, yours. Now, make your voice heard.

The New Yorker contest isn’t the only game in town. When you’re done with this decision, you can enter the Land Big Fish cartoon caption contest, see other entries as they’re submitted, and rate your co-competitors from 1 to 10 (in .5 intervals, Olympics-style). If you win, you get a free one-year subscription to the non-evocatively named Honey Hole, The Trophy Bass Magazine. On second thought, maybe they’d better change the prize to a lifetime supply of Jig & Pigs:

There are changes within Honey Hole Magazine, Inc. and this has caused a lot of gossip in the chat rooms and concern among members. When something changes after over 20 years some people decide to make up their own stories about what’s actually occurring (but they did that before any changes were ever made, too). It’s possible the magazine will be sold as well, but not done as yet. If you phone or email the office you will find that we’re still answering the phones and email. Email the office at honey100@airmail.net

We have sold the television show. We also made the decision to hold no further team or family events and because of this are restructuring magazine issues. This has everyone rushing to ask questions about the portions of Honey Hole that pertain to them. If it is not mentioned in the first paragraph, it has not changed. The club web site at TheBassClub.com is still open, club pages at HoneyHoleMagazine.com will be unavailable for viewing for a short period while the site is redone. We are removing team, family and television pages and have a lot of major renovations to do on the site as a whole. It is a lot easier to just take everything down and put it up fresh for the web site. So bear with us.

Thanks for your patience and kind emails and phone calls. We hope you all have a wonderful 2005.

It doesn’t sound that wonderful for the staff whose issues are being restructured. Hope things have improved, and in the meantime, pretend it’s the early part of the last century and all you do in your spare time is sit around thinking up clever captions for things and slogans for laundry soap. “Contest gold has all the lure of pirate gold,” as Wilmer S. Shepherd used to say, and he would know; he was “the founder of the Shepherd Correspondence School of Contest Technique (‘the Harvard of contest schools’) in Philadelphia,” reported Time in 1952. “Lesson Six (‘The Big Secret at Last’) tells students to relax and ‘start putting words on paper. Start with the first word that pops into your mind relating to the product. This word will suggest another word. Simply jot them down as they come to you—and keep writing!’ ”

That is really good advice. Use it for the next drawing, by Annie Levin, which looks like it’ll be lots of fun to work with. Professor Shepherd—who “won his first contest ($5 and all the ice cream he could eat) at the age of 12″—would want you to go for it.

Go In to Win! [Time archive]

Categories: NYer, Issue, Cartoons, Contest, Magazines

to vote in the cartoon caption contest (see below) and give publication and a signed print of the Mike Twohy drawing to the rightful winner (Roy Futterman). There’s no time to lose!

Categories: NYer, Cartoons, Contest

There’s only one funny entry in this week’s cartoon caption contest, for the drawing of the scientist dressed as a very large rat (in incongruous shoes; see below). I shouldn’t have to tell you which one it is, but it’s the middle one: “More important, however, is what I learned about myself.” (Writer: NYC’s own Roy Futterman, who’s possibly the ad director for Criticas magazine—if true, it makes sense.) The other two, with all due respect, are not too funny. You still have time to refresh your memory of the picture and vote now to ensure that Mike Twohy gets the caption his drawing deserves. Voting ends at 11:59 P.M. E.S.T. this Sunday the 8th, so make haste.

I’m a little surprised nothing better came of the first round—the third finalist, “Well, it was just easier than making a thousand tiny lab coats,” is intriguingly nuts but awkwardly worded—but perhaps people will be so perplexed at the current options that they’ll come up with something genuinely good for the new drawing. It’s of a man (lots of men as central actors here, I note without comment) much the worse for wear, crawling toward a fully staffed phone bank whose sign reads “Emergency Hotline.” A woman (reacting) shouts down at him—what? Only you can decide. Let’s pull up the level a bit here, people.

By the way, a very fashionable person here in Williamsburg’s Atlas Cafe and I have just conferred about the abovementioned shoes of Twohy’s super-rat. I’ve known many scientists, and those who didn’t wear dress shoes to the lab usually wore sneakers. None wore shoes like this whiskered fellow’s; they look (according to Alexis the barista) like reinforced-toe work shoes, as you might wear on a construction site, or possibly orthopedics or hiking boots—Doc Martens, perhaps, or Timberlands. I would even venture to say that if I didn’t know better, I’d think they were those Mary Jane-ish shoes with thick soles and chunky heels that it was once necessary to own. In the days of Harold Ross, this kind of thing would send a cartoonist slinking from the art meeting back to the drawing board, tail between his legs (so to speak), but in this case it seems to have escaped notice. The footwear of the other scientist (and that of the somewhat Quentin Blake-ish rats) is not visible.

Categories: NYer, Cartoons, Contest, Ross

I promised I’d address the cartoon caption contest, inaugurated in the April 25th issue. My own first reaction was to write below the drawing, “The artists seem nervous about this new marketing scheme, Mr. Mankoff.” My mother, as usual, was more thoughtful. She writes:

I love Mike Twohy’s lab rat cartoons—especially the Dr. Henderson one (“When Dr. Henderson comes in, everybody play dead”). I’m trying to think of a caption, without much luck. So, we have the clipboard guy in the fuzzy rat suit, glasses and street shoes, taking notes and reporting to the lab-coat guy, who appears to be nonplussed. Some of the rats are paying attention, but most are wandering around in their cages.

The only caption I can think of is something like “Participant Observation, Perkins. It all comes down to Participant Observation.” Pretty lame, I realize, but it does call to mind my neophyte anthropology fieldwork days, and the (temporary and misplaced) illusion that I was following guidelines, “fitting into the community” and being something other than a blatant outsider—inevitably creating data perforce to suit my thesis, rather than recording or observing anything genuine, which was elusive and would have taken far more time.

“Participant observation” is probably long gone from the ethnography lexicon now, but as late as the 1960’s the term was still seriously bandied about. The concept was important to the funding of Margaret Mead’s Samoan fieldwork—idea being that as a woman she could find out all kinds of things that the male researchers had only limited or formal access to.

How naive and simplistic it all sounds now. Why would the Samoan (and later the Balinese) women confide in Mead, a white woman and an outsider, suspiciously unmarried, and transient? Similarly, why would the men open their hearts to the tall, somewhat eccentric safari-clad New Zealander Reo Fortune? Researchers like Gregory Bateson and Claude Levi-Strauss had a clearer task: looking into linguistics and local economics and the broad dynamics of social structure. Religion: always more murky.

Back to the lab rats; I look forward to seeing what the winning caption is. But what the heck, I’m writing my personal version on the drawing for posting on my refrigerator. Whatever, the rats with their whiskers and pointy noses are wonderful.

By the way, it’s going to be hard to outdo Twohy in the caption department. If you scan all of his stuff in the Cartoon Bank, you may be surprised to see what a high percentage of really hilarious captions there are. The current issue’s blank cartoon looks like good material for the right writer, though, so I’ll be my optimistic self (I find that even as I become more pessimistic, I seem to remain an optimist almost despite myself) and say good luck to them all, and I’m eager to see the results.

Q. & A.: Your Caption Here [New Yorker; Mankoff explains the contest, its challenges, and its origins. “Now, if instead of the receiver he had a banana in his hand—”]
“I don’t usually volunteer for experiments, but I’m kind of a puzzle freak.” [Twohy, Cartoon Bank]
“Five thousand hours, and his vital signs are still strong.” [Twohy, Cartoon Bank]

for not buying this sooner: The Party, After You Left, the latest collection by Roz Chast. A cartoon by her always improves the magazine by a good ten percent, so a whole book of them…it’s delightful.

One of the things I like about Chast is that she can be nonchalantly naughty even within, say, her household-of-neurotics model; in Dream Remote, it’s no surprise to see “Comb your hair” and “Change that awful shirt,” but why “Faster” and “Slower”? Hmm, I wonder. She also cartoons about death a lot more often than you’d think, considering how funny she makes it (she says Charles Addams was a major early influence, and it shows). Chast works somewhere between Ed Koren and Lynda Barry/Matt Groening, maybe with a dash of the underworshipped Sandra Boynton thrown in for dry but zesty wit.

She gives a witty interview, too; from a conversation with Adam Wasserman in MediaBistro a few years back:

I got some weird responses to a “Written Test on Gun Control” that ran on The New Yorker‘s back page—multiple-choice questions and essay questions, like, “When I have a gun in my hand, I feel…”

There were a few people who filled it out for real with some pretty horrible things, like [in a heavy Southern drawl], “I feel like blowing the head off of every cocksucker I see!” [Laughs.] It was just unbelievable. People were crawling out of the woodwork and you think, “Why are they reading The New Yorker?”

Read more of that. There’s good stuff about the magazine’s famously scarring art meetings, and this about one of her “Mixed Marriage” riffs, several of which are printed in The Party, After You Left:

What is your favorite cartoon that never got published?

I’ve got a few that I have submitted over and over again. I don’t know if I have one favorite. I have one that is basically a mixed marriage one. It’s about a bathing suit. A wife is showing the husband this bathing suit, and he makes a comment about it being gaudy and not liking it. They’ve never published it, but I hope that someday they will. Some I’ve submitted four or five times. I know they have seen it before. I just hope that they will just suddenly see it in this brand new hilarious way or they will buy it and it will never be seen again. [At least] to pay me off. Some hush money.

I also—blissed out on inky nostalgia from being in Coliseum Books (even if it was the newer 42nd St. one)—got New York: The Movie Lover’s Guide, by Richard Alleman. It is very, very well done, nicely put together, crisply written, and so far I’ve seen only one inconsequential error in the update from the ’88 edition (Kim’s Video on Bleecker is, semi-sadly, no more; it had an even sillier ordering system than the other one, but I miss it anyway). This is a book you’ll want. Buy both.

“The Party After You Left” by Roz Chast (Bonus Audio!) [Andertoons]
The Art of Pysanka [Chast demonstrating gorgeous egg-painting; NYT via Suite101]
Roz Chast [Planet Cartoonist; cool profile]
Roz Chast is my personal savior [BookofJoe, via Blogcritics; actually about Maira Kalman and Rick Meyerowitz]

[A note on the Cartoon Bank: Sometimes they let you blow up images so you can actually read the text on them, which is essential to enjoying a Chast cartoon. The two images linked above are not readable, and only “Dream Remote” has a staffer’s caption. I hope they’re working on this; it’s a real hindrance.]

Categories: NYer, Chast, Cartoons, Books, Movies

Reviews of the Cartoon Anthology are great—everyone’s got a different idea of what the cartoons are all about. Here’s a zippy new one by Jerome Weeks in the Dallas Morning News that’s also an interview with Bob Mankoff. It includes cool facts like the payment for each cartoon (about $1,300), how many cartoons come in a week (1,000 or so), the percentage the artists take from Cartoon Bank sales (40-50%), and the number of left-handed contributors, according to Mankoff (roughly half). Good stuff:

The New Yorker started publishing high-quality cartoons 80 years ago—”when you had a million different magazines doing it,” Mankoff says, “like Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post.”

Simply put, The New Yorker is the one that survived. Today, a periodical such as Barron’s or Mother Jones prints the occasional panel, but only Playboy (started in 1953) still has a comparable commitment and a similar identification with them.

As for new magazines, Mankoff says, “they’ve gotten over-designed. There’s no place for a cartoon. Plus, they don’t have a real system. The entire system—it’s in our DNA. We have a cartoon editor, people filing them, we have fact-checkers checking them….”

This sets up a question too:

Many young people have undoubtedly picked up an issue, entranced by the comic images, only to find that they had to decipher whatever elusive bit of humor was coded in them.

True, Mankoff says. But not so much anymore.

“They have gotten funnier,” he says.

The thing is, there are also some only-semi-young people (for instance in My Age Group) who don’t find them that funny. Plus, as I learned many times over when I tried to explain the jokes to my frustrated grandparents in the ’90s, there are older people who don’t get them either. What’s to get? we say, though obviously there are always duds. But there seems to be an optimal age range for New Yorker cartoons. If anyone wants to venture a guess as to what that range might be, I’d be very interested to hear it.

And if your next thought is that there’s an optimal class demographic too, I wouldn’t be so sure about that. A whole lot of people buy those golf and cat and lawyer books from Barnes & Noble, and the other day I saw several much-taped cartoons in the nurses’ room at my doctor’s office. The one that startled me, though, was a lush cover drawing of a Thanksgiving turkey at the fortuneteller’s by William Steig. As I sat in my paper shift, I contemplated the message: As the turkey waits, a single tear runs down the fortuneteller’s cheek as she looks into the ball. Oh dear! Now that’s an effective cartoon, especially in the right setting.

By the way, as you’ll see from the link below to the Steig cartoon, the good people over at the Cartoon Bank provide helpful descriptions for the uncaptioned cartoons; here, “(Turkey getting his fortune told as fortune teller sheds a tear.)” Sometimes, they add explanations—perhaps for those baffled folks of all generations addressed above? Take this one, for instance:

The caption underneath says, “(Rooster sings: ‘DAY-O! Day-ay-ay-o!!’ chorus of chickens sing, ‘Daylight come and me wan go home.’ Refers to ‘The Banana Boat Song’ by Harry Belafonte.)” I love that. If this ever gets beamed into space along with all those Craigslist ads, the aliens are totally going to get it. While they’re hanging around the ether, I hope they take a minute to explain it to my grandparents.

Collection of New Yorker cartoons a wry, dry way to look at America [Dallas Morning News, via Florida Sun-Sentinel]
Doomed turkey [William Steig, Cartoon Bank]
Shanahan chickens [Cartoon Bank]
Playboy: 50 Years: The Cartoons [Powell’s]

From Clive James’ review of the Camille Paglia poetry book in yesterday’s Times:

My own prescription for making poetry popular in the schools would be to ban it—with possession treated as a serious misdemeanor, and dealing as a felony—but failing that, a book like this is probably the next best thing.

A book like this—I agree wholeheartedly! So what’s it called?

‘Break, Blow, Burn’: Well Versed [NYT]
A Brief Autobiography of Camille Paglia, as Told Through Introductory Appositive Phrases in Her Online Column [McSweeney’s]
Out of Sight [James on Huxley, The New Yorker]
“It’s National Poetry Month…” [Cartoon Bank]

Better late than never&#8212from Gothamist reader Hamilton, this nifty illustration of a point of view obviously shared by more than me and Marty Markowitz:

Actually, now that I think about the nudity part of Adam and Eve, the illustration done this way recalls a polymath typesetter I know who enjoys sunbathing naked in Brooklyn. In fact, he prefers border towns like Brooklyn Heights and the park in DUMBO for his breezy basks. Since (as of press time) no outsized digit is ordering him to take his towel to Wall Street and affix a button-down fig leaf, he can stay in Paradise, and his tan line will be forever even.

The Reverse New Yorker Cover [Gothamist]