How Not to Write a Caption

How Not to Write a Caption

Every week, a New Yorker cartoon is posted online and printed in the magazine without a caption, and thousands of people write in with their suggestions. Readers vote on a winner, and the top pick is printed in the following issue. Willy Staley and Matt Jordan submit a caption pretty much every week, working as a team. They’ve been doing it for years, but they never win—and they probably never will. Their goal isn’t to write a winning caption; it’s to write the most wrong-headed, vulgar, and hilariously inappropriate caption possible. “There’s something to the typical New Yorker cartoon,” says Jordan. “It’s succinct, it tends to be clean, it tends to be on cue. We just try to curveball around that.” Using their failings in the official contest, they’ve built an online following for their Tumblr blog “Shitty New Yorker Cartoon Captions.” They sat down with The New Yorker’s cartoon editor, Emma Allen, to discuss what separates a typical losing caption from a truly shitty one.

Episoder(1020)

Zadie Smith on Politics, Turning Fifty, and Mind Control

Zadie Smith on Politics, Turning Fifty, and Mind Control

Since Zadie Smith published her début novel, “White Teeth,” twenty-five years ago, she has been a bold and original voice in literature. But those who aren’t familiar with Smith’s work outside of fict...

24 Okt 202528min

Richard Linklater on His Two New Films, “Blue Moon” and “Nouvelle Vague”

Richard Linklater on His Two New Films, “Blue Moon” and “Nouvelle Vague”

Richard Linklater is one of the most admired directors working today, and yet moviegoers may admire him for very different things. There are early comedies such as “Slacker” and “Dazed and Confused”; ...

21 Okt 202521min

How the Trump Administration Made Higher Education a Target

How the Trump Administration Made Higher Education a Target

The swiftness and severity with which the Trump Administration has tried to impose its will on higher education came as a shock to many, not least university presidents and faculties from Harvard to U...

17 Okt 202529min

John Carpenter Picks Three Favorite Film Scores

John Carpenter Picks Three Favorite Film Scores

The filmmaker John Carpenter has a whole shelf of cult classics: “They Live,” “The Thing,” “Escape from New York,” “Halloween,” and so many more. And while he hasn’t directed a new movie in more than ...

14 Okt 202512min

Zohran Mamdani Says He's Ready for Donald Trump

Zohran Mamdani Says He's Ready for Donald Trump

Next month, New York City may elect as its next mayor a man who was pretty much unknown to the broader public a year ago. Zohran Mamdan, who is currently thirty-three years old and a member of the Sta...

10 Okt 202548min

How Lionel Richie Mastered the Love Song

How Lionel Richie Mastered the Love Song

Lionel Richie has been making music for fifty years. He has sold more than a hundred million albums, his hits too numerous to list, and he has endeared himself to younger generations as a judge on “Am...

7 Okt 202530min

A Conservative Professor on How to Fix Campus Culture

A Conservative Professor on How to Fix Campus Culture

Robert P. George is not a passive observer of the proverbial culture wars; he’s been a very active participant. As a Catholic legal scholar and philosopher at Princeton University, he was an influenti...

3 Okt 202526min

Jimmy Kimmel and the Power of Public Pressure

Jimmy Kimmel and the Power of Public Pressure

The Political Scene’s Washington Roundtable—the staff writers Jane Mayer, Susan Glasser, and Evan Osnos—discuss how, in the wake of the reinstatement of Jimmy Kimmel’s show, public resistance has a ch...

30 Sep 202543min

Populært innen Politikk og nyheter

giver-og-gjengen-vg
aftenpodden
forklart
popradet
aftenpodden-usa
stopp-verden
det-store-bildet
lydartikler-fra-aftenposten
fotballpodden-2
nokon-ma-ga
rss-gukild-johaug
dine-penger-pengeradet
hanna-de-heldige
rss-ness
aftenbla-bla
rss-penger-polser-og-politikk
rss-utenrikskomiteen-med-bogen-og-grasvik
rss-dannet-uten-piano
rss-espen-lee-usensurert
frokostshowet-pa-p5