Your Caption Has Been Selected
More Than Anyone Could Possibly Want to Know About The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A behind-the-scenes look at The New Yorker cartoon caption contest, its history, how it's judged, and the secrets to writing a winning caption
Every week, thousands of people enter The New Yorker cartoon caption contest in hopes of seeing their name and caption in print. But only one person has made it to the finalists’ round an astounding fifteen times and won eight contests: Lawrence Wood, also known as the Ken Jennings of caption writing.
What's Wood's secret? What makes a caption good or bad? How do you beat the crowd? And most important, what makes a caption funny?
Packed with 175 of the magazine's best cartoons and featuring a foreword by Bob Mankoff, former cartoon editor of The New Yorker and creator of the caption contest, Your Caption Has Been Selected takes you behind the scenes to learn about the contest’s history, the way it’s judged, and what it has to say about humor, creativity, and good writing. Lawrence reveals his own captioning process and shows readers how to generate the perfect string of words to get a laugh. Informative, funny, and just a little vulgar, this book will delight anyone who doesn't have a personal vendetta against the author.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wood, a Chicago lawyer who has won the New Yorker's caption contest eight times, debuts with a diverting overview of the contest's history and offers tips on how to win it. After the magazine's cartoon editor Bob Mankoff introduced the contest in 1999, it grew quickly in popularity and drew thousands of entries from ordinary readers and even such celebrities as composer John Williams, journalist Maureen Dowd, and film critic Roger Ebert, who won in 2011. The task of sifting through 10,000 entries each week fell to Mankoff's assistants before the magazine decided to crowdsource the first phase of the selection process through an online portal in 2016. Wood outlines 29 suggestions for writing winning captions, recommending that readers "eliminate unnecessary words," "make the speaker oblivious," and end captions with the punch line. Wood includes a bounty of cartoons illustrating the advice and serves up plenty of amusing pieces of trivia (Zachary Kanin, Mankoff's former assistant who went on to write for Saturday Night Live, recalls weeding through entries before crowdsourcing was implemented: "There were always about five hundred submissions that were like, ‘Good news. Now you're getting a better deal through Geico' "). New Yorker readers will get a kick out of this. Illus.
