Cartoon Caption Contest

Hey gang, thanks for participating in the Cartoon Caption Contest. unfortunately the caption contest experiment has not worked out as I had hoped. The results of the caption contests, while imaginative and clever, just don’t work as ‘real’ cartoons. That’s not because of lack of imagination or humor on the participants part, but more due to the nature of the caption contest itself. I have noticed that the same is true for the New Yorker caption contest. The results rarely, if ever, rise to the level of actual New Yorker cartoons. The winners of caption contests come off as very clever responses to the drawing – nothing more.

I started the cartoon caption contest because I wanted to give others who don’t have access to the editors at The New Yorker a chance to get a cartoon published in that magazine by including the winner in my weekly batches. Unfortunately, the results just don’t work for that purpose. And again that’s because of the nature of the caption contest. As imaginative and funny as past entries have been, they still don’t really measure up to the ‘real’ New Yorker cartoons or even to the cartoons that are published in other markets I work with such as Barron’s or Wall Street Journal.

It is for these reasons that I am retiring the Caption Contest experiment.

Here’s past New Yorker great Dana Fradon to both make my point and help the medicine go down: