Hey, cartoon-caption-writing compulsives, for the first time in a decade "The New Yorker" is staging a Reverse Caption Contest

by Ken

What you see above is one example provided by New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff of the process of a Reverse Caption Contest. Of course in the standard weekly New Yorker Caption Contest, one of the magazine's formidable roster of cartoonists provides a drawing minus a caption, and readers are invited to submit their best efforts. In the "reverse caption" process, cartoonists are provided with a caption for which, as Bob puts it, they have to "come up with an unusual image that makes it into a punch line." As, for example, the line "No wonder we could get tickets."

"We did this about ten years back," Bob explains, "with exactly that phrase." And the results included the cartoon above, and also these:




In case you hadn't guessed, the occasion for this look-back is Bob's announcement of a new Reverse Caption Contest. "Send your reverse-cartoon-caption entry to reversecaptioncontest@gmail.com," says Bob, "and we’ll pick the top three phrases for our cartoonists to hilarify." He goes on to provide Cartoon Contest links, which you'll find onsite: "To Enter the Contest," "To Help Pick the Three Finalists," and "To Vote for the Winner."

It's an interesting question how different a process it is to concoct a conception totally from scratch vs. creating one to complete an existing drawing. I'm afraid I have no insight to offer, since my brain seems singularly ill-suited to cartoon-caption-writing. For me the Caption Contest is strictly a spectator sport. Over the years I've found that whenever I actually try to do the contest, all I come up with are pathetically obvious, literal snoozes -- I've never come up with anything I wouldn't be horribly embarrassed even to submit. It's always interesting, when I do spend time on it, to check back to see the way the three chosen finalists' minds took the caption and ran with it.

How different is it when you're in complete control of the caption content? Boy, are you asking the wrong person.

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"A great cartoonist creates a whole world" (Bob Mankoff): Celebrating "New Yorker" greats Wm Hamilton and Roz Chast

Update: Adding the caption to that final Wm Hamilton cartoon (oops, didn't realize it wasn't included with the graphic!)

by Ken

Some readers will have noticed that after goodness-only-knows-how-many years of daily (and even twice-daily) posts here, I pretty much disappeared from this space -- and even, sometime after that, from my own Sunday Classics with Ken from DWT blog. There were lots of reasons, but overshadowing them all was the deadly combination of deadline exhaustion and a profound sense of purposelessness.

Of course, the habit of scrounging each and every day for a post-worthy subject (often defining "post-worthiness" really, really broadly) doesn't die easily, and in the ensuing time I've been constantly beset by ideas I thought I really should write about. But I learned, not at all to my surprise, that once I didn't "hafta" write, I pretty much always didn't write. So while the profound sense of purposelessness hasn't lightened -- nor, for that matter, has the dread of that implacable looming deadline, even if it's just for some crappy blogpost -- I found myself with lowered resistance the most recent time Howie broached the subject. And, tough negotiator that he is, he pinned me down to a thrice-weekly schedule (Wednesday, Friday, Sunday) of, well, something.

And the obvious starting point is with a post idea I tried to execute a couple of months ago: a remembrance of the great New Yorker cartoonist William Hamilton, who died April 9 after a career at the magazine (among other places, of course) spanning "more than 50 years" and "more than 950 published cartoons" (these numbers according to New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff, from whom more in a moment). That remembrance proved hard going, though, because I felt obliged to explain first how it happened that, for all the blogfootage I've devoted to New Yorker cartooning and its greatest practitioners, from James Thurber to Roz Chast, I didn't recall ever having mentioned WH. And what could I say except that over my decades of New Yorker readership, I had become so used to his presence that his work came to feel like simply part of the natural landscape rather than an act of human endeavor.


William Hamilton (1939-2016)

The first note Bob Mankoff took of the passing was in an April 10 post called "Remembering the New Yorker cartoonist William Hamilton," whose entire text read:

The New Yorker cartoonist William Hamilton died on Friday. When someone as witty and clever as William Hamilton passes, you feel the obligation to come up with something commensurately witty to commemorate those great cartoons. I’d rather let some of his best work do that.

Bob's instincts in such matters tend to be impeccable, and the slide show that formed the rest of the post was pretty breathtaking. I've included one sample up top, one that happens to speak really loudly to me at the moment. (It might be said to be shouting at me.) And here are a couple more that also, in my present state of advanced age and unemployment (a state I may want to talk about a bit more one of these days), have seismic resonance for me:




Of course that April 10 post hardly exhausted the subject, and the very next day Bob returned with a post called "The World of William Hamilton," which began:

What separates great cartoonists from really good cartoonists is not any single cartoon—many really good cartoonists have done individual cartoons that are great—but that a great cartoonist creates a whole world.

Like Peter Arno, Charles Addams, James Thurber, and Roz Chast, the great and now, so very unfortunately, late William Hamilton did just that. In more than nine hundred and fifty cartoons published over five decades, he skewered the comfortable class he was a member of with the acerbic wit of an insider.

His drawings were a delight, effortlessly fashioned with an old-fashioned Crow Quill pen dipped in India ink. Above is an image from an episode of “Nightline,” in 1997, catching the master in the act.

Of this particular image, he remarked that he had no idea where the woman he was drawing came from. But one thing he did know was that she looked pompous, and that “being unaware of your own pomposity is always funny.”

This led Bob to an interesting take on his subject's cartoonistic genius:

On “Nightline,” Ted Koppel said of Hamilton, “He looks every inch the patrician Wasp—all six feet five inches, in fact. He could be one of his own upper-crust characters.”

No way. That elegantly attired six-feet-five frame was both imposing and proudly pompous, but certainly not unaware of who he was and the foibles and failings of his tribe.

There’s much talk these days of what the purpose of humor should be. The general consensus is that it shouldn’t kick down but punch up. When I think of Hamilton’s cartoons, neither of these descriptions comes to mind. Rather, I think of him vigorously elbowing to the side—with very sharp elbows, indeed.

Finally, Bob invoked a name that has been plastered all over this space:

Not unexpectedly, tributes from his fellow New Yorker cartoonists are flooding my inbox right now. Here’s one from the inimitable Roz Chast, which I think captures his work and meaning perfectly.

“William Hamilton was the real thing. His cartoons had a distinctive visual style and voice. They took place in a specific world: that of upper-middle class, socially ambitious, attractive men and women, at home, at cocktail parties, and in restaurants. They were ‘Hamilton people.’ His cartoons were funny, but they were not just jokes. They were closely observed social critiques done by someone who was both inside and outside of the world he was critiquing. I often think of one or another of his cartoons. One of my favorites is of a Hamiltonesque couple at a restaurant with their adult son and daughter and they all have cocktails. The mother or father says, ‘It’s so much easier now that the children are our age.’ ”

For the record, Bob added one more Wm Hamilton post, an April 25 "Postscript," noting the publication of one final cartoon:

William Hamilton had a lot to say about the nation’s country-club class and how it viewed itself. His cartoons were peopled by ladies and gentlemen of the Park Avenue variety, speaking confidently about their place in the upper crust, even as that crust was crumbling. Hamilton first found a place at this magazine in 1965, when he was only twenty-six. At the time of his death, last week, at seventy-six, he had published more than nine hundred and fifty drawings that lampooned sophisticates and pseudo-sophisticates with dry, incisive jabs. He was that rare artist whose style suits his humor perfectly; a Hamilton joke is unimaginable rendered any other way. A final one, alas, appears here.

And here it is:

"What the hell are you trying to do?"

Now, speaking of Roz Chast . . .

For a while, while I was grappling with the Hamilton nonpost, I thought maybe it could be combined with exciting news about and from the amazing Ms. Chast, who was to be the subject of an elaborate exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York scheduled to open in May, and scheduled to include an appearance by the artist herself, on May 6.

If that last sentence suggests some uncertainty as to whether the events eventuated, rest assured that they did. The exhibition is open, and will remain so through October 9, and is obviously self-recommending to anyone who is within striking distance of the museum (in Manhattan on Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street) and has any curiosity about the absurdities of life as we know it, including a lot of laughter at them.

The exhibition Roz Chast: Cartoon Memoirs continues at
the Museum of the City of New York through October 9.

Myself, I will have to get back to the exhibition, as there was simply too much to take in after the May 6 event, when we in the audience had an opportunity to go upstairs and peruse it. It's also possible that I was in a state of imminent collapse from all the roaring laughter I did, pretty much nonstop, during Roz's abundantly illustrated presentation. I was hardly alone. The whole overflow audience had been reduced to a state of near-collapse reminiscent of the killer joke in the classic Monty Python "World's Funniest Joke" piece.

The only surprise was that Roz didn't seem, as I expected, in any way reserved or retiring, an impression I'd formed in my head from all her years of self-portrayal, including in particular her 2014 book Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, which featured prominently in the presentation. (In this space we looked at some of it, in a pair of 2014 posts based on the portion of the book that appeared online in a newyorker.com "sketchbook" and then in a 12-page spread in the March 10 issue of the magazine.)

Here, for example, are just a few bits of her portrayal of her parents, who were born 11 days apart in 1912, had known each other practically all their lives, and "had tough lives," says Roz, "way, way tougher than mine."





Roz ventured that, "between their one-bad-thing-after-another lives and the Depression, World War II, and the Holocaust, in which they both lost family,"



OF COURSE WE'VE SEEN LOTS MORE OF ROZ'S WORK

Just hit the "Roz Chast" label below.

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Notes on the blizzard that wasn't -- at least not right where we are

"We'd love to come, but the weather
mongers have paralyzed us with fear."

Well, I stayed up a good part of the night waiting for the blizzard that didn’t come. And then, at about 3 A.M., the forecast was downgraded to overcast with a chance of flurries. The kid in me was disappointed, but the part that passes for an adult was really happy that I didn’t have to shovel my driveway.

I don’t fault de Blasio, Cuomo, or Christie for their abundance of caution, but enough already with the exuberant weathernoia of the television forecasters.

Also, memo to the forecasters in their hermetically sealed TV studios: Next to one of those humongous touch-screen displays, install a window.

-- New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff,
in a blogpost this afternoon, "Blizzard?"

by Ken

Before proceeding, let me look up to that phrase I added after the dash in the post title: "at least not right where we are." As we all know (don't we?), every when the weather folks correctly predict the general path of a storm, they still can't ever predict its exact path, and differences in distance that don't amount to much on the cosmic scale can count for a great deal on the ground. Here in NYC we got something like eight inches of snow -- not nothing, but a heap less than the two feet or more that was bandied about yesterday. However, to the east of us, on the eastern part of Long Island and on into New England, there was nothing "disappointing" about the storm that materialized. This morning, as the weather guy on the NY1 cable-news channel reviewed the situation, he said it wasn't quite true that the brunt of the storm "missed by a mile," that it was more like 23 miles. But they were an enormously significant 23 miles.

That said, you may recall that in my storm post last night, as we here in the Big Apple stood watch for a nor'easter threatening us with two feet of snow, if not more, I included Noah's prognostications, among which the first was:

1. The "Blaming of de Blasio" will begin by 7:00am on Tuesday.

Right on target, as it turned out. The wrinkle here is that what Big Bill stands charged with is overpromising stormwise, or should I say for overpreparing for a storm that just didn't measure up to the conjurings of the "weather mongers" featured in the Bob Mankoff cartoon pictured at the top of this post.

And, strangely (or maybe not so strangely), it seemed to be Big Bill rather than Boy Andrew, the governor of our empirical state, who stood accused of "overreacting," even though the decision to shut down the transit system by 11pm was the governor's and not the mayor's.

All of this, mind you, despite the fact that a regular feature of last night's all-storm coverage was the very near-impossibility of matching the level of storm preparedness to the level of eventual actual storm. How many times did we have the talking heads on the TV droning on about the dilemma of, on the one hand, doing too much to prepare for a storm that delivers too little as against, on the other hand, doing too little to prepare for a storm that delivers too much?

Of course, this was also a prominent feature of our last pre-storm talkathon, the run-up to Superstorm Sandy. And post-storm recriminations were pretty sharp then too, even though the level of damage could hardly have been more impressive or widespread. The storm itself, though, hadn't been the monster we were expecting; why, it hadn't even maintained its hurricane force -- hence, the rechristening from Hurricane to Superstorm Sandy. The damage was mostly caused by the rains in combination with tides.

Last night, as was widely noted, there was no precedent for a transit shutdown in anticipation of a snowstorm -- in part because the only precedent we had for a deliberate shutdown was the one for Sandy, when the shutdown may hardly have prevented damage to the system but assuredly protected an awful lot of transit resources that would surely have been lost otherwise, and also made the restart of the system, as slow as it was, a whole lot faster than it would have been otherwise. (Of course the biggest obstacled to the restart were the electrical-power outages and the devastation of the subway and under-the-river tunnels, in a city that sits almost entirely on islands.)


As NY1 showed us, rush hour on 14th Street wasn't terribly rushy this morning. Drivers who violated the traffic ban in force through this morning were threatened with summonses, but reportedly none were issued.

In addition to the transit shutdown, last night there was an equally unprecedented 13-county ban on non-emergency road traffic. So one thing we didn't see in NY1's endless on-location reports from reporters who were stationed at various points around the metropolitan area was traffic struggling along clogged roads. For that you need traffic and clogged roads. Instead we had pictures of locations around the metropolitan area that were traffic-free to an extent that probably nobody as seen since the invention of the automobile. Well, no, even farther back. Before there were motor vehicles, there were horse-drawn carriages and the like to clog those roads.

Times Square with no New Year's Eve revelers and also no traffic, anyone?

I SUPPOSE IT'S JUST HUMAN NATURE

You just about can't win. Get people prepared for a level of mayhem that doesn't materialize and it's all your fault. Contrarily, fail to prepare for the actual level of mayhem and it's also all your fault.

What's more, as Noah was intimating last night, if you're Mayor Big Bill, you walk the city with a target on your big back. The odds are pretty good that whatever happens, it's going to be all your fault.

By morning we had known for hours that here in Gotham we weren't getting "historic storm" quantities of snow. By 9am word was that the subways were gradually being restarted, and by noon they should be running on a "Sunday schedule," meaning markedly lower levels of service than a normal "weekday" or even a "Saturday" schedule. I didn't know this yet, though, because about 7am I ended my overnight vigil in order to get some sleep, having no idea that this time the subways could be restarted so quickly, relatively speaking. (The NYC Transit people had planned this, apparently running trains all night to make sure the tracks were clear and the equipment was ready to roll when called upon.) Once I was up to speed, a couple of hours later, I decided I would give it a shot -- getting to work, that is -- still not really knowing what conditions I might encounter, not knowing even whether my office building would be up and running. I was all set to go, more or less, when my resolve failed me. Yeah, there's stuff I should have been doing at the office. We have publication schedules we're answerable to, and forcibly yanking a day out of the schedule isn't consequence-free. Oh well. It'll all be there for us tomorrow.


A QUICK NOTE FROM HOWIE

He thanks everyone for all their good wishes, and of course hopes to be back in harness soon. The doctors don't seem able to tell him much, though, and don't seem to much of a grasp of, or interest in, the concept of a "blogging chair."


SCHEDULE NOTE: Next post tomorrow at 7am PT/10am ET

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Moving week at the office is traumatic for everyone, including "New Yorker" cartoon editor Bob Mankoff

In his current "Cartoon Lounge" video, Bob decides, while clearing out his old office, that there's no way he's tossing the album from his bar mitzvah in 1957 at the Hotel Pierre, where he "made out like a bandit."

by Ken

Would it be fair to guess that most readers have had the experience of an office move on the job? Offhand I can remember four of them -- two each on two jobs -- and while of course they're nowhere near as traumatic or exhausting as home moves, they can be pretty trying and tiring.

I bring this up in connection with a distinguished visitor to this space we had recently.

Back around Thanksgiving I wrote a post ("Breaking news: Bob Mankoff sheds light on the age-old New Yorker Question of Québec '"), in which I'm afraid I spoke rather harshly about Bob's new weekly Web video feature, "The Cartoon Lounge," which has basically replaced the weekly blogpost he has been doing for a while, which I thought was one of the great adornments of Western civilization.

It didn't help that I couldn't necessarily see the videos, owing to my general difficulty of access to the content of newyorker.com since the promised new paywall went up. The paywall was not supposed to exclude subscribers, but via both Safari and Firefox on the two different Macs that I use, I was literally unable to sign in. (If I click on what is presumably supposed to be the "Sign In" link, the screen refreshes, but instead of getting any sort of sign-in window, I simply lose my scroll bar.)

Still, from what I had been able to see of the "Cartoon Lounge" outings to date, I wasn't much impressed, and speculated that they had a lot to do with pressure from above to bulk up the website's video content, which I gather is thought to be of prime value to online-content shoppers.

Anyway, I was charmed to learn that Bob himself had added this comment to that post:

Hi Ken,

Bob Mankoff here. Yes, it's really me. Sorry you don't like the lounge but understand your point of view. I will be doing both a regular blog post and the video.

The lounge is a lot better when you can see the videos. But I agree the blogs can be much more substantive while being funny.

Why, thanks for visiting, Bob, and thanks for the update.

Never let it be said that I'm unwiling or unable to revisit a past judgment, and this seemed a good time, as I was intrigued by this week's subject as announced in Bob's weekly e-mail, "Moving On, Out, and Up," which begins:

We’re moving way up, because The New Yorker is packing up the whole kit and caboodle and, beginning next week, will be high above lower Manhattan in our new office at 1 World Trade Center. How high? Well, let’s put it this way: the cloud with which we cloud-compute is twenty floors below us.

As I suggested earlier, this subject of an office move resonates pretty strongly for me, and I guess I'm far enough out of the loop that I didn't realize -- or maybe just remember that I knew -- that The New Yorker was moving. So I opened up Google Chrome (this being the computer on which I have Google Chrome), even though I already had a Web browser open (which is also the one in which I'm writing and will post this post), and took a look, and I'm not sorry I did.

First I took a look at the "Borowitz Report," bearing the shocking news: "Republicans Accuse Obama of Using Position as President to Lead Country." I miss "The Borowitz Report," but if it means digging into my monthly allotment of free newyorker.com clicks (six, isn't it?), well, I just don't often do it, especially since I'm supposed to be getting it free as a subscriber. (More about this ongoing battle in a moment.)

I proceeded then to the "Cartoon Lounge" page, where I found one bit of additional information: "In this 'Cartoon Lounge' episode, I pack on up some of my own stuff and bid a tearful goodbye to an old vending machine."

And that's just what we see. (I tried, by the way, to embed the video, using the alleged embedding code provided, but as with most of my efforts to embed other-than-YouTube videos, I failed.) At the time the video was made Bob appears to have had a lot of packing left to do. "When you're clearing out after 15 years," he says, "you find a lot of things." And we see him sorting through some of that accumulation. He's able to chuck a couple of things, but then comes to the bar-mitzvah album documented at the top of this post, and that's a keeper -- too many fond memories. Then there is indeed a visit to a fondly remembered snack machine, which turns out -- like most of the building, Bob says -- to have had its contents already removed.

I don't know that I would have found this "Cartoon Lounge" outing clickworthy if I was on the clickmeter, but I enjoyed it. Come to think of it, if Bob does actually continue to write actual blogposts, I'll have to make the same decision.


MEANWHILE, I STILL HAVE TO MAKE A DECISION
ABOUT CANCELING MY NEW YORKER SUBSCRIPTON

Which brings me back to this problem. I've separated out this part in the knowledge that it will be of little concern to readers, but no, my problem with newyorker.com access is still in place, and I'm feeling alarmingly close to the point where I have to make a decision about the only action that seems available to me, which is to cancel my subscription.

I gave up communing with The New Yorker's dubiously titled Customer Care department when a Customer Caregiver finally acknowledged in passing that there actually was a "Safari problem" that was being worked on. This followed several rounds of being told by said caregivers that the solution to my problem -- my inability to sign into the website using my account was simple: just sign in using my account. In my follow-up queries I begged to be put in contact with a tech person, of which I assume there must be some, but no luck.

The most interesting response I got was from a reader who speculated that the sign-in function involves use of a pop-up window, and many of us specifically block pop-up windows. My commenter ventured that many developers fantasize that their pop-up window will miraculous penetrate the blockade. My chief reservation regarding this theory was that eventually I discovered that I could achieve link in via Google Chrome, a browser that I almost never use, and that in fact I don't (and can't) have on one of those two computers I use.

I notice also that The New Yorker now specifies that total website access is not automatically available to new print-edition subscribers, by which I understand that there are now two classes of magazine subscribers. (I guess new subscribers have to exercise the option to buy a print-plus-website subscription.) Actually, I should say that there are three classes, the third being those of us who have been subscribers for eons but still don't have website access.

And therein lies my dilemma. I'm still getting what I've been paying for all these years: the more or less timely arrival in my mailbox of every print edition of the magazine. So if you look at it one way, I haven't been deprived of anything. Except in real-world terms, I have been. There's a fair amount of newyorker.com content I've come to enjoy and value. Probably not enought to pay for it if it comes to that, but enough to feel deprived when it's taken away.

Maybe it's not much of a principle at stake, but it's a principle of sort, and given my now-bottomed-out hopes of any help coming from Customer Care, I can't think of anything to do other than pull the plug on the subscription. It will be a traumatic step, because I like the magazine a lot, and spend a lot of time with most issues. On the plus side, though, making the break will save me oodles of time.

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Let's see how quickly Dwight has a submission picked for the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest

by Ken

"Got this e-mail the other day," writes New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff, adding, "It’s not the first of its kind."

This reader is completely non-plussed by the premature deadlines for your cartoon contest, in that they are dated one day before the cover publication date of the magazine, which in my case is often not delivered in the mail until too late to enter.

What exactly is the point of this kind of discouragement to your enthusiastic subscribers? I hope and pray you will not ignore this complaint in an all too common post-modern electronic game of passive aggression.

Dwight (last name not given, because I forgot it)

Wouldn't you like to see our Mr. Bob wriggle his way out of this one? The contest deadline "one day before the cover publication date of the magazine"! Well, it turns out that he doesn't so much wriggle his way out of this one as wriggle his way around it.

First he stalls:

Actually, a postmodern electronic game of passive aggression is now available as an app. You can try to download it, but it takes an endless amount of time to load, flashing you the message “I’m loading. Give me a minute, or, if you can’t wait, cancel it if you want—I won’t be mad. Really.”

Hey there, Mr. Bob, focus! Remember? The contest deadline "one day before the cover publication date of the magazine"? Mailed copy of magazine delivered too late to enter? Sound familiar? Huh?

Okay, here goes. "Look," he says, "the short answer to this problem is that there is no problem."

You can enter the Cartoon Caption Contest online (which is the only way you can enter it) at the stroke of midnight Eastern Standard Time. You don’t have to wait for it to appear in your mailbox.

Note that what he means by "you don’t have to wait for it to appear in your mailbox" is: You're a damn fool if you wait for it to appear in your mailbox, and there isn't a damn thing I can do for you. Actually go back to where he says, "You can enter the Cartoon Caption Contest online," and then immediately adds parenthetically what he really means: that you have to it online, there's no other damn way of doing it. Viewed this way, Mr. Bob isn't so much helping Dwight as taunting him. I suppose it's fair to note that Dwight posed his question via e-mail, and so if he can do that, presumably he can check out the Cartoon Contest online and enter it online -- again remembering that he has to enter it online.

At this point, claiming that "I really do want to help," Mr. Bob goes into a "step-by-step guide for all the Dwights out there. The first two steps are fairly straightforward, at least once Dwight accepts if he waits for his mailed subscription copy of the magazine, he's cooked.

1. Go to http://contest.newyorker.com/

2. Look at the cartoon there, and come up with an ingenious caption.

An alert observer might point out that going to the Contest page might not be as automatic as Mr. Bob is suggesting, if Dwight has used up his month's worth of free articles. In theory, of course, as a subscriber Dwight has unlimited access to the newyorker.com website, but as I've pointed out, this isn't necessarily the case. I (to pick a random example) am unable to sign in to my account in Safari or Firefox, and while I have the word of Sharon in Customer Care (I think it was Sharon; I'll be damned if I'm going to dig out the e-mails to rub my own nose in the futility) that work is proceeding on a fix for the Safari problem, a fat lot of good that does me while work on this massive project proceed.

Okay, even though one might assume that a higher percentage of New Yorker subscribers than of other demographic groups use Macs and are trying to connect via Safari or Firefox, let's assume that Dwight has snuck around this hurdle and can actually get onto the contest page. Presumably, he at least thinks he's got No. 2 covered as well. If he didn't think he could come up with an ingenious caption, he wouldn't have gotten involved with this whole problem.

(In which connection I might point out that, at least in the judgment of the judges, Dwight is very likely kidding himself about the ingenuity of his putative caption submissions. Just think of all the enterers who go thousands of contests without getting a peep out of the judges. Remember the experience of the late Roger Ebert? It could be that Dwight's logistical obstacle to entering the contest has spared him countless hours of heartache.)

If Dwight gets through No. 2, No. 3 is a virtual gimme:

3. Write the caption in the box provided—just one, please. Multiple entries are not permitted, and fray our nerves.

After No. 3, however, the steps get trickier -- mostly having to do with either having or having to establish a contest-entering account -- that entail not only Nos. 4, 4a, and 4b, but a whole bunch of other things that don't have numbers, and include a section of "Potential problems," and in the extreme case we seem to wind up on "the password-reset page."

At this point, says Mr. Bob, "If all this doesn’t work, contact Dwight. He’s got it down pat by now." Maybe, maybe not. It seems to me entirely possible that by now Dwight has given up and is spending his time playing online poker.

Okay, it's possible that I sound a bit bitter. This could be because I am a bit bitter. I hope Dwight is making out better than I am.

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Breaking news: Bob Mankoff sheds light on the age-old "New Yorker" Question of Québec

If you really want to, you can watch Episode 5 of The Cartoon Lounge here.

"Any legal resident of the United States or Canada (except residents of the province of Quebec), Australia, United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, age eighteen or over can enter, except employees, agents, or representatives of Sponsor or any other party associated with the development or administration of the Contest, or any member of their immediate family."

-- from The New Yorker's "Caption Contest Rules"

by Ken

Confidential to New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff: Wherever you got the idea that You Oughtta Be in Pictures, the idea is nuts. Possibly it's your Web people pressuring staffers to generate more video content, for reasons that would be plain to a Web person but escape me. Whatever the reason, as excellent an idea as your weekly blogposts were, The Cartoon Lounge kind of sucks. It kind of sucked back at Episode 1, and it's still kind of sucking at Episode 5, "Technophilia."

And not just because most of the time when I try to watch these videos, I don't get video, I get a still image that lasts until (assuming I'm lucky) it's replaced by another still image a couple of minutes later. I would assume that this negates whatever point there was thought to be in doing these videos. Of course I can't confirm this because I don't know that point that might have been, except the peeps want videos, dude. This peep will, with reluctance, watch a video if it holds out some plausible promise of even minimally enhancing his life experience. Otherwise this peep's position is: If you've got something to tell me, ferchrissakes tell me and let's get on with it. If you succeed in conning me into watching a video that turns out to be a waste of my time, I promise to hold it against you.

As to this week's Cartoon Lounge, yes, we know that technology excites you and you're a long-confirmed early adopter. Goodness knows we know this. And if we didn't, or if you thought there was some new angle on this worth sharing with us, then the accompanying post at the same link is a viable way to do it. Having a camera roll while you display a bunch of gadgets on your desk and telling us that most of them are obsolete (as I gather you do in Episode 5) -- this is not compelling video. I gather that you also show us some of the cartoons you've done on technology issues, which I might have enjoyed seeing, but didn't. You know how you used to post cartoons with your blogposts? I always enjoyed that.

As to the subject of the posted post, your infatuation with Google Glass, or rather the hard time you're having with the hard time Google Glass seems to be having ("Rumors that it's on life support abound, and everyone seems to be either bad-mouthing it or giving it the evil eye, or both"), well, this is at least a topic. It's not a topic that much interests me, in the same way that Google Glass itself doesn't much interest me, but that could just be me. However, among the reasons you offer for your persistence in your infatuation, there's one that strikes a chord: "I don’t waste this much money on something without wasting lots of time on it as well." As much as I try to exercise care regarding the things I waste large amounts of money on, I often miscalculate too, and have a similiar response. I may never get my money's worth, but I will damn well get, well, something, even if it's just a proportionate waste of time as well.


ALL THAT SAID, HOWEVER, THERE'S
STILL THE QUESTION OF QUÉBEC

At the end of each Cartoon Lounge, Bob answers a reader question. Again, it's not exactly mind-altering video, but this week's question is pretty much the question:

Why are Québecois readers specifically barred from entering the celebrated New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest?

The question happens to come from a Québecois reader who is bitter about not being allowed to enter the contest, and therefore has an obvious interest, but as a non-Québecois reader, I've been gripped by this question every time I've read this seemingly peculiar contest stipulation. I mean, that's a pretty specific exclusion: If you're 18 and a legal resident of the United States, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, or the Republic of Ireland, you're good to enter -- unless, poor soul, you happen to be a resident of (shudder) Quebec. (I sometimes wonder about other exclusions among the world's English-speaking populations, like New Zealanders, but at least they don't have to suffer the stigma of being singled out week in and week out.)

I'll leave it to DWT readers to judge their level of interest in Bob's presumed "comical" answers and jump to the actual one, which not surprisingly comes from the lawyers. Québec, it seems, has a whole set of regulations about contests, and apparently they apply even to one that offers no greater prize than a signed copy of the cartoon. Some of the regulations, not surprisingly, have to do with the provinces legally mandated bilingualism (everything about the contest would have to be posted bilingually), but there are also specifications like al

l contests having to be registered with some Québecois authority or other. The obvious and inevitable result is to bar all citizens of the province from participating. Apparently they're legally permitted to read the feature, though this may just be a problem of the difficulty of enforcement.


POSTSCRIPT: I TRIED ONCE MORE TO WATCH
CARTOON LOUNGE EPISODE 5, AND GOT LUCKY

Thinking I would want to quote Bob's actual explanation of the above, I made one more attempt to watch the video, and had more success. I decided it wasn't going to be worth the possible trouble involved in stopping and restarting the clip enought to transcribe the portion I wanted. But this time I did at least get to the old technology-themed cartoons of his that Bob displays. He says this one from 1984 sums up his relationship to technology (or something like that):

"All my gadgets are old. I'd like some new gadgets."

Okay, noted.

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Food, glorious food -- or maybe not so glorious in Bob Mankoff's cartoon world

"Well, pay me! He ate it."

by Ken

First off, let me confess that I added the comma after "well" in the above cartoon caption. Sorry, I just couldn't read it without the comma.

Okay, that said, let me explain that New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff offers this cartoon as the first in a series of three he says sums up a piece he happened to reread recently, Anthony Bourdain's April 1999 "Don't Eat Before Reading This," which "detail[s] the unsavory behind-the-scenes restaurant practices that foist crummy cuisine on a credulous clientele."

All of which apparently came to mind because Bob was thinking about a familiar phrase: "Like watching sausage getting made."

The idea being that you may like how sausage tastes, but that if you saw how sausage was made, you would find it a lot less appealing. The idiom applies not just to sausages but to the unsavory activities that are the backdrop for what we enjoy or admire, from law to medicine to politics to whatever.

The Bourdain piece, Bob says, "brings the sausage metaphor home to its source -- food." And here are the other specimens that for Bob "sum up his piece in a few cartoons."

"Push the salmon with dill sauce."

"Is there anyone here who specializes in stress management?"

NATURALLY THERE'S A SLIDE SHOW

And it's of restaurant quality. Perhaps not surprisingly, I can't resisting this gem from the great Carl Barsotti:

"The chef said all the regular stuff is
as special as it's going to get today."

Okay, maybe one more. You can check out the classier offerings for yourself. I offer you this cautionary tale from the great Jack Ziegler:

"That's the food biz. Celebrity chef one day,
graveyard shift hash jockey the next."

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The New Yorker cartoon dept. takes us behind the scenes, revealing stunning cartoon secrets

"This island isn't big enough for two clichés."

by Ken

They're a pretty tight fraternity, those New Yorker cartoonists. Which makes it all the more remarkable that this week the cartoon dept. is taking us behind the scenes and revealing some of their most closely held secrets: the locations of some of the most heavily used cartoon settings. (It's said that to be admitted to the guild every cartoonist has to produce a successful cartoon using at least one of these locations.)

"Yhis week," says cartoon editor Bob Mankoff in his e-newsletter-slash-blogpost, "The Secrets Behind Cartoon Tropes," "the cartoonist David Borchart takes us behind the scenes to view the real scenes underpinning some of our most enduring cartoon clichés. O.K., David, open that vein." Yes, the floor is yours, David.

DESERT ISLAND

The desert island featured in hundreds of New Yorker cartoons actually exists. You can see it in Eastchester Bay, about forty yards from City Island, in the Bronx.

It's virtually a stone's throw from the Bronx.

THE GRIM REAPER

The Grim Reaper in New Yorker cartoons has been portrayed since the nineteen-seventies by the veteran character actor Vera St. Croix. She took over the role from longtime reaper Marjorie Breek.

Vera is the magazine's second Grim Reaper.

THE ANALYST'S COUCH

That well-worn analyst’s couch is actually a custom-made cat bed. It’s twenty-five inches long and stands just four inches off the floor.

My gosh, it's a custom-made cat bed!

GURU ON THE MOUNTAIN

The guru on the mountain is a private-cave owner named Olmer Sky, and the location, as many alert readers have noted, is Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. While not a guru, Olmer is a lay speaker in his Methodist congregation.

Olmer S is a committed Methodist.

THAT TRACKLESS DESERT

And those sun-addled wretches crawling through the trackless desert wilderness, painfully dragging themselves toward a distant punch line? With selective framing, no one needs to know that they’re in Brighton Beach.

Son of a gun, that's Brighton Beach!

PLUS THERE'S -- WHAT ELSE? -- A SLIDE SHOW

I've never been to a party with Bob M, but I would be at all surprised if he does this there. Guests are invited to throw out subjects, and when they agree on one, Bob produces a slide show. This one, of course, is a gallery of New Yorker cartoons that have used the secret settings. The slide show leads off with the doozie at the top of this post. Among the offerings is this one of Bob's own:

"And this is my cousin Dave, who
handles the conventional wisdom."

Courtesy of Bob Mankoff we have a cartoonists' guide through the delicate subjects of proper eating habits and weight control

"Is everything O.K., sir? We noticed
that you aren't constantly eating."

This delicious offering from Christopher Weyant comes from the slide show assembled by New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff for his latest blogpost, "Three Amazing Cartoon Diets You Won't Believe!"

by Ken

As noted in the caption above, the title of Bob Mankoff's blogpost this week is "Three Amazing Cartoon Diets You Won't Believe!" And while Bob does eventually get to the promised cartoon diets, I'm afraid you'll have to check those out for yourself -- we're not going to get to that. In fact, as Bob sets up his premise, he litters it with cartoon illustrations that you'll mostly also have to check out for yourself. I've allowed myself one two three exceptions:

Obesity, as the media informs us daily, if not hourly, is no laughing matter. The truth is, humor is not kind to any deviation from body norms . . .



. . . or one's mind. Whether you are fat or skinny, dumb or too smart for your own good, you are grist for the cartoon mill.

"I just figured out why we've
never had girlfriends."

Now, when it comes to “people of size,” I’ve been there and done that cartoon:

"Get off me, lard-ass!"

[Cartoons by Alex Gregory (more from Alex in a moment),
Matthew Diffee, and of course cartoon-master Mankoff -- Ed.]

AT THIS POINT, BOB IS JUST ABOUT TO
GET TO THE THREE CARTOON DIETS . . .

. . . which are, by the way, The Reverse-Meal Diet, The Tiny-Utensils Diet, and The Zeno's-Paradox Diet. But as I mentioned, we don't have time for that. You can make it an independent-study project. We're going to skip ahead to this disclaimer and announcement:

One final word: before embarking on any of these diets, it might be advisable to consult a physician or a psychiatrist.

While you’re awaiting that consultation, here’s a big helping of diet-related cartoons. Enjoy! In moderation, of course.

AND THIS IS WHERE WE'VE BEEN HEADING --
TOWARD ONE OF BOB'S BEST-EVER SLIDE SHOWS

In fact, the chosen cartoons are all so good that I hate to omit any of them. But life is a series of choices, and here are mine, starting with a pair by William Haefeli and P. C. Vey which invoke The Wisdom of Expert Authority Through the Ages. (I confess that the Haefeli zinger, despite its perfectly clear sense, took an extra couple of beats to register fully for me, but when it did -- ooh, that poor guy!)

"I really shouldn't have any dessert. My trainer
told me never to eat out of boredom."

"My doctor says you should be drawing
more fruits and vegetables."

There are two characteristically species-muddling contributions (no puppies, though!) from our much-loved late comrade-in-cartoons, the great Charles Barsotti:

"I start every diet with the best intentions, but it
goes to hell as soon as I sense blood in the water."

"Eat lots of carrots."

I think it's clear why Alex Gregory, who needed no caption at all -- just a map legend -- for the cartoon of his we saw above, was allowed an unusually long caption for this one:

"I started my vegetarianism for health reasons,
then it became a moral choice, and now
it's just to annoy people."

Whereas this inspiration from David Sipress also needs no caption:

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Hot enough for you? Summer blasts its way in -- and we've got it in cartoon form

New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff adds a note of caution to this vision of paradise conjured by Roz Chast: "Don’t try this at home unless this is in your home." (Note: You should be able to enlarge tonight's cartoon's a little -- like from 420 to 465 pixels wide -- by clicking on them. You'll have to make this call for yourself.)

by Ken

Sorry, this is just another of those days when the thought of any of the things I could and perhaps should be writing about just makes me too crazy, and it's a day when I felt obliged to take off from work even though that meant making the tradeoff of settling for a fan blowing in my face rather than the frigid air conditioning of my office, on one of those days when the frigid air conditioning feels like a blessing, at least when you first come inside. (We all know that when winter is safely behind us, it's time to schlepp all the cold-weather gear -- the sweaters, the woolen caps, the parkas -- into the office.)

Luckily for me, New Yorker cartoon editor today served up a summer-themed weekly blogpost-slash-e-newsletter, "Summer Is Icumen In," leading off with the above-posted Roz Chast vision of summer paradise.

Since we already have a sort of "office motif" going, let's start out with a cartoon of Bob's own:



And as I contemplated dragging my torpid body to work for the sake of the summer deep freeze, David Sipress seems to have capture something close to what I was feeling about the stay-at-home alternative:



There are, of course, inconveniences here in the city particular to every season:



Meanwhile, for those who are able to escape the mean city streets of summer, I assume you've got your Summer Reading List assembled for the beach. Here's a title you may want to add:



It's not true that New Yorkers don't drive. Lots of us don't, but then there are the unstoppables who do, and who -- especially in Manhattan -- regularly confront the ongoing horror that is NYC parking. But as with many things, there are seasonal variations:



Stay cool!

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Charles Barsotti (1933-2014)

The last from Charles? (From the June 9/16 New Yorker)
[Click to enlarge]


by Ken

The cartoon for which Charles Barsotti is most famous, New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff reminds us, "has nothing to do with any of [the] 'big questions.' I'm not sure what it has to do with, but I dare you to look at it and not laugh."

Okay, Bob, let's take that dare. (Note: All of the cartoons in this post should be click-enlargeable. But sometimes you just don't know.)



No, quite correct, Bob, it can't be done. Not even in this highly rarefied genre of the pasta-based cartoon. You can't look at it and not laugh. And as you went on to say in your post yesterday, "Thank You, Charles Barsotti": "That, in the end, is the job of the cartoonist. Here’s to Charlie, and to a job well done."

If I read Bob correctly (we'll come to that in a moment), the cartoon atop this post from last week's issue is Charles's last. It is, to put it in technical terms, a beaut. If this is indeed the way he goes out, what a way to go! But then, in this regard Charles cheated. Just about every cartoon of his that was published ("close to 1400" for The New Yorker, Bob M tells us -- yikes!) gave off the feeling that it doesn't get any better than this.

In his remembrance post Bob wrote:

Charlie Barsotti, one of the great cartoonists, died today. Charlie drew close to fourteen hundred cartoons for The New Yorker over the years, beginning in the nineteen-sixties and continuing right through last week’s issue.

With the minimum number of lines, Charlie could extract the maximum number of ideas.

And he broke those ideas down into categories of "big ideas," of which he provided stellar samples.

"About inequality"


"Truth"


"Love"


"Politics"


"And Religion"


Then there's this unclassified cartoon, perhaps intended to showcase Charles's vast, ever-loving dog cartoon genre


I've sort of established as a set title format for remembrance posts: just the full name and dates. In this case, though, I would happily have followed Bob with his "Thank You, Charles Barsotti."


Books by Charles Barsotti
From his website (links onsite)

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