Your Caption Has Been Selected by Lawrence Wood

This book is less official than I thought - not that that's a bad thing, but I should note it.

Lawrence Wood is the reigning champion of the New Yorker's weekly Cartoon Caption Contest - he's won eight times and been a finalist fifteen times, far above anyone else. Bob Mankoff is the founding editor of that contest, though he left the New Yorker a few years back. Wood, supported and introduced by Mankoff, wrote Your Caption Has Been Selected to explain what the contest is, how it works, and, most importantly, how entrants can maximize their chances of winning.

(The long and informative subtitle, as required by any nonfiction book, is "More Than Anyone Could Possibly Want to Know About The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest.")

Your Caption was published by St. Martin's Press in 2024, and is not officially endorsed or otherwise directly connected with The New Yorker, as a disclaimer on the copyright page states. But...it does reprint more than a hundred New Yorker "drawings," with and without captions, so old-publishing-hand me suspects there was some kind of underlying agreement, possibly brokered by Mankoff.

Obviously, the audience for Your Caption is made up almost entirely of people who are already well aware of the Cartoon Caption Contest, and probably enter it regularly. (I used to enter back in the early days, but fell off the wagon some years ago and have never quite remembered to start up again.) So the "what is it" portion of the book is short and somewhat perfunctory - and it's not that hard to explain, anyway. 

Here's my potted version: The New Yorker posts a "drawing" without a caption on Week One, and during that week collects reader-contributed captions for it, which are also up- and down-voted by readers and sorted by a semi-automated system. In Week Two, an august board of New Yorker worthies selects three finalists, which are presented for a final reader vote in Week Three. Week Four sees the winning caption published.

Wood uses about a hundred examples, including the first few annual versions of the Contest going back to 1999, to discuss, in concrete terms, what makes a good cartoon caption and what should be avoided. His lessons are generally pretty good ones: be short, address the elements of the cartoon (who is speaking, any incongruities, all the major oddities), avoid the obvious jokes that everyone else will think of, and put it into the best words for the idea possible. He has some more detailed rules, too, which are also good - don't take my thumbnail here as covering it all.

This is a fun book about cartoons, which delves more deeply into how and why single-panel cartoons are funny - and the ways in which they can attempt to be funny and fail - than a "normal" collection of cartoons. If you're the kind of person interested in theories of humor, this is a good choice. Or if you just want to see your name in The New Yorker and win a contest - it could be useful there, too.