TUESDAY UPDATE: Got this e-mail today from one of our entrants...
Those were the five BEST? Really?? First, shouldn't it be "yearly international meetings"? Then "I don't think our offer is being well received" ... please explain how that's funny, because I don't see it. And "Corporate said some cuts were going to be made.." what a stretch. I mean how many seconds does it take to make that connection in your brain - I think it was about two seconds before I thought "heads are gonna roll," then noticed that someone else had already submitted it; surprise. You should put in the instructions that you are looking for obvious, unfunny captions. Must be friends of yours.
My reply:
Sorry _____. I tried drafting other people to pick the finalists and it didn't work out very well. I might try that again, but all it really does is move things from me being subjective to someone else being subjective.
Maybe someday we'll be able to have a logistically plausible vote on every caption entered, but at the moment that's beyond my technological capabilities. And opening it up to 10 finalists (which I also tried) was just unwieldy. Which means that you're stuck with me for the time being.
On the other hand, I don't know these people, so I'm not picking my friends. But it's still a matter of taste.
For the record, I thought this week's answers were pretty funny.
--Dan
The e-mail got me to thinking: Should I talk about what goes into the picking process? There's not enough room to do that in the paper, but I've got limitless room to talk about arcane points online... so... For insights into how I do this thing, click on the link to see me interview myself (I told you that this was a small staff)...
WHAT IS FUNNY?
Obviously, this is a dead-end question that only an unfunny person would attempt to answer seriously. However, if you were to create a continuum of cartoon humor with The New Yorker's cartoons at one end and, say, "Ziggy" at the other, my personal sense of humor would trend toward The New Yorker end of the spectrum. Of course, I also get a kick out of Daniel Radosh's ANTI-New Yorker caption contest, too...
WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?
Personally, I'm more from the understated school, and my favorite captions tend to be jokes that I have to think about for a beat or two before I get their oblique humor. That said, I've also nominated puns, Catskills-style jokes and various topical quips.
DOES SPELLING COUNT?
Not really. If I think an idea is funny I'll fix any spelling or grammar issues that I notice. One thing you may notice is that I'll often change the punctuation of entries, particularly if the original ended in an exclamation point. For some reason, lots of funny people seem to think that adding an exclamation point emphasizes the punch line, but IMHO most of those one-liners are funnier when I end them with a period. Anyway, bottom line: Don't be shy about entering your jokes.
DO YOU ALWAYS PICK THE FUNNIEST CAPTIONS?
No, actually I don't, and here's what I mean: There have been multiple contests in which multiple entrants have independently come up with more-or-less the same punchlines, and sometimes these jokes are my favorites. Which means that there have been weeks when I've left my favorite entries off because there's no good way of picking one winner for what amounts to the same joke. I have, on occasion, listed those jokes and mentioned the writers, but I don't include them in the official contest. And there are times when I think one particular variant is distinct enough that I'll include it.
One exception? A few weeks ago we had several people enter this caption: "Gesundheit!" And I loved it. And I listed multiple people with that one and put it on the ballot. That's also an example of a caption where the exclamation point works.
DO YOU LOOK AT WHO ENTERED THE CAPTIONS WHEN YOU PICK THE FINALISTS?
Yes... and no.
I tend to scan down the captions in the comments section, gathering up whatever strikes me and pasting them into a Notepad (.txt) file. Then I'll cull from that list.
Generally, if it's a close call for that final slot, I'll favor a newcomer over a contest veteran. Sorry guys: Just trying to keep everything as open as possible. And if there's someone with more than one entry in the final five, I'm more likely to bump one of those. Which is not to say that I've never included more than one caption from a single entrant in the same weekly finalists. It happened several times back in the early days of the contest.
So sometimes I'm aware of who made the cut and sometimes I'm not. I actually wait until Wednesday morning before I go back and put a name to every entry.
WHAT ARE SOME COMMON MISTAKES ENTRANTS MAKE?
An obvious mistake is to write too much dialog. These cartoons are drawn with the idea that you get to make one character in the panel say something, so if you're writing "He-said, and then she-said" gags, you're not going to make the cut. I pointed this out in an earlier column, and people got the message right away. That was very cool.
Being mean is sometimes a bad idea. Snarky sarcasm aimed at public figures is one thing, but if you're mean enough, I won't post your entry at all. And yes, that's subjective. We've had a few people who sent in jokes that struck me the wrong way about sex or race and I just spiked 'em. But basically I post whatever you send me unless you write something that rubs me the wrong way as offensive, or at the very least something that I wouldn't feel comfortable printing in a family newspaper.
Making fun of the cartoonist is a daring tactic, but it might not be your best shot at making the finals. Because if you make me cry ... well, let's just not go there.
Reading too much into the details of a cartoon rarely cracks me up. Try to find a theme that doesn't require de-constructing the minutiae of the drawing, since most of the details are just there for decoration or background continuity. That said, there have been examples of people who have made me laugh out loud by finding REALLY funny stuff that I didn't intentionally put in the cartoons. Of course, I then PRETEND that I intended that stuff all along.
DO YOU HAVE A CAPTION IN MIND WHEN YOU DRAW A CARTOON?
Great question. You are so perceptive.
THANK YOU.
Yes, sometimes I do (I had a caption I rather liked for the World War II airplane cartoon, for instance), but other times I just draw something that seems to have potential, like this Friday's cartoon. I've been trying to come up with a caption for it all afternoon. By the way, the next cartoon in the series will be the first one with more than one panel, and it's the first one I've made in months that has a color version for the Web.
IS BREVITY THE SOUL OF WIT?
Hmmm. If that were true, then the quote would be "Shorter is funnier" (16 letters and three words vs. 21 letters and six words). But generally, yes. Pithy jokes are often the best, and no, I'm not lisping.
There is one technical issue to keep in mind: I use a free polling service called Vizu to handle the voting, and it has a character limit for each poll question. I think it's about 170 characters, including spaces. If I really like a joke and it's a little too long, I'll edit it to try to make it fit. If I can't squeeze it in, it goes away and gets replaced by something shorter.
WHO DIED AND MADE YOU KING OF THE CAPTION CONTEST?
That would be Bryce Donovan. It's a closely guarded secret around the newsroom, but Bryce has been in a coma ever since he stepped in front of a bus several months ago (he'd gotten all goo-goo-eyed over Kristin Hankla), and we've been using a free humor-writing algorithm I downloaded from teh Interwebs to generate his columns ever since. We tried to get his "Robo-Bryce" replacement to officiate this contest, but it kept generating lines like "and by smart I mean mind-numbingly stupid," so we moved on.
Newsrooms are serious places, so a goofy little thing like a cartoon caption contest is basically invisible -- up to the moment that someone complains about it. Which is why you're basically stuck with me as the combination cartoonist/writer/caption-picker/contest-runner/blogger, up to the moment when they lay me off.
WHY CAN'T WE HAVE T-SHIRTS?
Because there's no budget for T-shirts. Apparently there's no budget for stickers, either. But I'm seriously considering roughing up Ken Burger and making him cough-up his sticker budget. Just to hear him whimper like a little schoolgirl...
HOW DO YOU SLEEP AT NIGHT?
Horribly.
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