Your Caption Has Been Selected: More Than Anyone Could Possibly Want to Know About The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest

by Lawrence Wood

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

For anyone interested in the New Yorker's cartoon caption contest, this is the niche history you never knew you needed. Highlighting the best of the winners while dipping into the most winningest captioneer of all, you'll never know more about the contest.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250333414
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/04/2024
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	730,933
File size:	82 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Lawrence Wood has been a finalist in The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest a record-setting fifteen times and won eight contests. For more than twenty years he was a lecturer in law at the University of Chicago Law School, where he taught a class on housing and poverty law that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia dismissed as a “waste of time.” Lawrence is currently the supervising attorney at Legal Action Chicago.

Editorial Reviews

04/15/2024

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. Agent: Daniel Greenberg, Levine Greenberg Rostan. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"An appealing book about a surprisingly difficult task: writing a good cartoon caption. Entertaining . . . throughout, the author is charmingly eccentric and pleasing." —Kirkus Reviews

"Diverting . . . New Yorker readers will get a kick out of this." —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

2024-02-14
An appealing book about a surprisingly difficult task: writing a good cartoon caption.

It is fair to say that the New Yorker caption contest is a genuine cultural phenomenon, attracting thousands of entries every week. Wood, who has won the competition an unmatched eight times (and made it to the final round 15 times), is perfectly situated to examine why a good caption works, as well as explain how the contest operates. The contest is so popular that simply managing the entries, as well as the public vote on a selection of finalists, has become a huge logistical task for the magazine’s editors. There is no prize for the winner, other than bragging rights. In this entertaining book, Wood includes 175 of the best cartoons and captions, aiming to distill the essence of the humor. Some of the captions are droll, some are wryly thoughtful, and some are laugh-out-loud hilarious. Wood believes that it is the limitation of a caption, where everything must fit in one short comment, that is the key to its appeal. He provides a long list of criteria, highlighting the importance of identifying the speaker, telling a story, avoiding vulgarity, connecting to the details of the cartoon, and selecting the best from several options. “If your caption is selected as a finalist,” he writes, “launch an aggressive social media campaign to win the popular vote. Don’t rely solely on email.” Throughout, the author is charmingly eccentric and pleasing. Interestingly, numerous comedians regularly enter the contest but do no better than other people. Wood, for his part, is not professionally humorous; he is a lawyer. Now that’s funny. Bob Mankoff, the former cartoon editor at the New Yorker, provides the foreword.

Wood has a great time here, mixing the bizarre, the jocular, and the wise into a clever package.

Kirkus Reviews