Patrick House won the New Yorker cartoon caption contest, and wrote an article for Slate about how you can do it too! It helped me understand why I’ve never gotten anywhere when I’ve entered it before. Link. Excerpt:
Should you make a pun or, perhaps, create a visual gag about a cat surreptitiously reading its owner’s e-mail? Neither. You must aim for what is called a “theory of mind” caption, which requires the reader to project intents or beliefs into the minds of the cartoon’s characters. An exemplary New Yorker theory of mind caption (accompanying a cartoon of a police officer ticketing a caveman with a large wheel): “Yeah, yeah—and I invented the ticket.” The humor here requires inference about the caveman’s beliefs and intentions as he (presumably) explains to the cop that he invented the wheel. A non-theory-of-mind caption (accompanying a cartoon of a bird wearing a thong), however, requires no such projection: “It’s a thongbird.” Theory of mind captions make for higher-order jokes easily distinguished from the simian puns and visual gags that litter the likes of MAD Magazine. To date, 136 out of the 145 caption contest winners (94 percent) fall into the “theory of mind” category.
11 June '08 at 7:24 am
Speaking of New Yorker cartoons, here’s a concept I can’t quite get a handle on: animated versions of their cartoons. It’s a novelty, and they’re well done, but it seems pointless. It goes against the whole idea of the single frame cartoon, the way it tells a story in one visual grab. All these little animations do is to pad it out by dramatising the moments leading up to the punchline, detail you don’t need for a well-drawn cartoon. You’d wonder why they bothered, unless as a gimmick or to give a job to some starving animators (fair enough, I suppose). http://www.newyorker.com/humor/cartoons/daily/animations