The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest Book

by The New Yorker, Robert Mankoff

The New Yorker presents the best of the cartoon caption contest. Write your own captions for the top 100 cartoon contests, then see the best, and all the rest.

Since its inception in 1925, the New Yorker has been world famous for its cartoons. Not surprisingly, the cartoon caption contest has quickly become one of the magazine's most popular features. Located on the back page, the contest invites readers to craft their own captions for the weekly cartoon. Thousands enter each week, but only one wins.

This entertaining collection, the first of six books in an exclusive series with Andrews McMeel Publishing, presents the top 100 caption contests, with the winners, the runners-up, and everyone in between (available on-line), plus fun facts and stats about who is entering and why. Learn how the finalists came up with their captions, and how their lives changed after winning. Discover the inner workings of the caption contest and then see if you have what it takes to be a successful cartoon caption writer.

Genres: Humor, Nonfiction, Comics, Comic Strips, Cartoon

216 pages, Hardcover

First published September 23, 2008

About the author

The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry published by Condé Nast Publications. Starting as a weekly in the mid-1920s, the magazine is now published forty-seven times per year, with five of these issues covering two-week spans.

Reviews

[Mac · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyable! There’s a brief history of the New Yorker contest followed by a brief explanation of how it works, and then you’re off—100 cartoons. The book’s layout and rhythm create the fun. First, you find a cartoon with no caption; then turn the page, and the cartoon is repeated with the winning caption, plus several almost winners. For variety, there are occasional comments from finalists summarizing their personal experiences—how difficult it is to win and how impressed their friends were to know a winner.

The enjoyment is twofold—100 (mostly) humorous cartoons and the chance to match wits with the winners. Let’s just say creating a caption is harder than it looks, but that doesn’t detract from the fun.

[Mark Isaak · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is set up so the reader sees the uncaptioned cartoon, may try thinking up their own captions, and then turn the page to see the winning caption and runners-up. I personally would rather have seen twice as many captioned cartoons instead of the uncaptioned ones, but the given format certainly captures the spirit of the contest well. Occasional sidebars add comments about how language in captions differs from typical English and comments from a few winners. The list of frequently-used words with each cartoon, on the other hand, merely distracts. I was impressed that the cartoons have not become dated over the last decade.

[Cathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the funniest cartoon book I've read in a long time. I read parts of it with my family. We'd try to come up with captions before we read the winning ones. I liked that the book included several winning captions, so there was even more silliness per cartoon. My favorite was the one about the kids not respecting the law of gravity

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked reading the comments from winners and near-winners!

[Dan Castrigano · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty funny. Great way to pass the time as I get sleepy before bed. The shorter the captions are, the funnier they are.

[Lisa Vegan · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite part of the New Yorker magazine always has been the cartoons, and I’ve loved the cartoon contest entries ever since they started that feature. I don’t subscribe, even though many friends do, so I read the New Yorker only occasionally in places such as doctor waiting rooms, so not very often.

I recognized only a couple of handfuls of these entries; most were new to me.

Many of them are very funny and almost all are at least somewhat amusing.

In the magazine you see the 3 finalists and the winner. In this book you see the top five selected, including the three finalists and ultimate winner. Seeing the fourth and fifth editors’ choices was interesting. Also fascinating is that the breakdown in votes for first, second, third place is shown; those statistics are not given in the weekly magazine. There are keywords for each pre-captioned picture and I didn’t find those to be that interesting; I assume many readers will disagree with me about that. There are sporadic “interviews” with winners and runners up on some of the cartoon pages and some of those were enjoyable.

I meant to pace myself and read only a few of the entries at a time, but I ended up reading this book in only two days.

A high degree of creativity is shown with so many of these. Reading these it seems as though it would be relatively easy to come up with a clever idea but I suspect the entrants make look easy what is really challenging. Some of the winners and runners up are professional writers but most are not and none are professional cartoonists, yet these cartoons are as funny as the other New Yorker cartoons written by the professionals. I admire them so much and enjoy their efforts. I have to give this book 5 stars for that, and the book is also organized well and contains many, many cartoons; they didn’t skimp at all with the amount of content.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hilarious! I love how you can write your own captions before seeing the winner's. It made me realize how hard it is! I also like that the second and third place entries were there (as well as two runner-ups) so that there were tons of laughs with each cartoon.

[Leah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, the cleverness!

[Kama · Rating 1 out of 5]

So dull, both captions and cartoons.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was worth the dollar I paid for a used copy.

[Jiwon Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This made my day today :)

[David Kempler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm in it!