Lots of poets dream of publishing a poem in The New Yorker. And while I, too, would love for Paul Muldoon to tap me on the shoulder and say, “Yes, Cody, your Obama clerihews have just the right mix of reserve and pathos,” the truth is that I haven’t submitted a poem to the magazine in about ten years. It just hasn’t occurred to me. Whereas every week, or almost every week, I submit a caption to the magazine’s cartoon caption contest. The winning caption: it’s the thing I most want.
At last, this week, I’m a finalist. This means that (a) I have a 33% chance of finally winning the thing, and (b) my entire month is being wiped out. Yes, I’ve been going to work; yes, I’ve been eating (too much, even); but mostly I’ve just been thinking about the contest. It’s gone from something that occupied maybe ten minutes of a typical Sunday to something that haunts my days and chills my dreaming nights.
It wasn’t always thus. I’d probably entered the contest 100, maybe 150 times, before last week; but, looking back on it, what I enjoyed most about all those submissions was sharing my entry with a friend and fellow caption-writer. We’d gripe about losing, sure — but the real object was to amuse each other. (In this way, our captions resembled our poems.) We’d lob questions back and forth — “Do captions ever have semi-colons?” — and we’d laugh extra-hard when our captions were extra-mean. (Again, in this way, our captions resembled our poems.)
Even better, I had used the caption contest as a teaching tool in my college writing courses. First at the University of Washington, and then at the University of Michigan, I ran weekly in-class contests, with prizes awarded to the winners. Writing good essays, I stressed, wasn’t so much about coming up with good ideas; it was about writing good sentences. And what better way to focus on the sentence than to write a caption? I’m serious. The issues that arise when writing a caption — issues of pacing, of word choice, of weight — are the same issues I want my students to consider when writing anything: an essay, an email, a villanelle. It’s excellent practice.
So, who wins the contest, in any given week? Stanford neuroscientist Patrick House won in 2008 and then wrote a smart piece about the experience for Slate. (His much-quoted advice: Don’t be too funny. He also recommends avoiding proper nouns.) Poet and New York Times critic Joel Brouwer has won. Larry Wood, a Chicago-based attorney, has won three times. (He gives away his secrets, here.) Roger Ebert has tried and tried and tried to win. Charles Lavoie should’ve won.
My favorite caption over the nearly five-year history of the weekly contest belongs to Jacqueline Tager of Hollywood, California. At a sidewalk cafe, a woman is about to turn her back on a distraught clown. Her parting shot: “Well, if you must know, he makes me laugh.” And maybe that’s who I really want to be: the guy the clown’s being left for. Still, I don’t know why I’ve let this contest take over my life. I don’t even love my caption: it’s more witty than funny. (My favorite of my semi-recent entries — and here I’m descending into Roger Ebert territory — was for this cartoon. My caption: “Here’s a little number about how much I hate fish.”)
Voting runs through this Sunday, at which point I can turn my attention to other things. If I win, great; like Patrick House, I can say I write for The New Yorker. If I lose, well, that’s OK, too. In the words of Dan Heath, the last winner of the yearly contest (the contest switched from yearly to weekly in 2005), “The one regret I have about winning the cartoon-caption contest is that it unmasks me as the sort of person who enters cartoon-caption contests.”