September 26, 20204
There’s a cartoon with a dolphin panhandling on a street corner. A man is reaching into his pocket to give it money. His female companion looks irritated. Chicago lawyer Lawrence Wood put words to her displeasure: “If he’s so damn intelligent, let him get a job.”
With that line, Wood won The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest in 2007. He’s repeated the feat seven more times—and placed second or third in seven other competitions.
Now in its 25th year, the esteemed literary magazine’s weekly competition features a wordless single-panel cartoon—often displaying disparate frames of reference. Contestants submit a caption for the image. The publication’s editors choose their three favorites from the 5,000 to 10,000 entries. Online public voting—more than a half million votes cast—determines the winner.
Wood is the contest’s most successful participant—by a lot. The contestant in second place has won three times.
In June, Wood, 61, published Your Caption Has Been Selected: More Than Anyone Could Possibly Want to Know About the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest.
In a recent interview, he offered advice to participants to increase their chances of winning and shared how captioning is a little like lawyering.
“Your job is to use language to persuade a judge that what you have to say is better than your opponent’s argument,” he says. “You are trying to make sense of this bizarre drawing. Lawyers are taught to take complicated situations and make connections that other people might not notice.”
He adds: “A good caption eliminates every unnecessary word to make its point.” This, he adds, is “not unlike what lawyers do when streamlining legal arguments.” But despite this, Wood notes that he also knows “a lot of really smart lawyers—lawyers who are a lot smarter than me—who are terrible at the contest.”
Over 29 brief chapters, the grand champion offers tips to increase one’s chances of seeing their caption appear in The New Yorker.
In a chapter titled “Everything Matters,” Wood writes, “Everything that appears in a drawing is important. The cartoonist put it there for a reason and you shouldn’t ignore it, but many contestants disregard this rule.”
He cautions that captions should not be too predictable. “Resist the urge to submit one that comes to mind immediately,” he writes. Besides, he adds, “If it’s obvious to you, it will be obvious to hundreds of people you’re competing against, which means your entry will likely get lost in the sea of similar or even identical submissions.”
While Wood has a lot to say about how to win the distinguished contest, participants should never forget this one piece of overarching advice: “Your caption should be funny. You don’t want someone to just admire it. You want someone to actually laugh.”
With so much talent for it, I ask Wood if he is sometimes surprised that his entry didn’t get chosen as a finalist. “Weekly,” he says, laughing. “I imagine that many people participating in the contest feel the same way.”
The article was first published on abajournal.com and its original form can be found here.
Randy Maniloff (LAW ’91) is an attorney at White and Williams in Philadelphia and an adjunct professor at the Temple University Beasley School of Law. He runs the website CoverageOpinions.info.