The New Yorker recently published this cartoon for their Caption Contest (#894). Clowns, but not just clowns, art too. What a coincidence! My own Sad Mona Project had been clowning around with museum art for at least 100 days as part of The 100 Day Project, so naturally I felt something had to be done with it.
Not particularly well done as collage goes; hastily put together on my phone using the native Photos editor and Photoshop Express (the skimpiest version of Photoshop you can imagine). Got the job done though and it was a big hit on my Insta, where all 100+ of the Sad Monas reside. @sketch_finish .
OK, so some remarkable facts about the Caption Contest can be found online: the complete dataset for submissions, including rankings of all 878,676 votes for contest #894. Holy!
Here’s what the data display looks like for contest #894, showing only the first eight submitted captions:
https://nextml.github.io/caption-contest-data/dashboards/894.html
Jain, L., Jamieson, K., Mankoff, R., Nowak, R., Sievert, S., (2020). The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest Dataset. https://nextml.github.io/caption-contest-data/
Their cautionary, qualifying, caption note: “These data were gathered as part of the The New Yorker (TNY) cartoon caption contest. The crowdsourced ratings inform the final judging of the captions, but the official winner is decided by the TNY editorial staff.”
And the winner was… I would guess no. 0 at the top of the list but I’m trying to confirm online. Without success so far. Stay tuned.
I think the winning result was published in the May 6th issue in case you have it. Let me know. I gave up my subscription to the NYer about a year ago, maybe it was two. As much as I love paper (and paper magazines are the best paper ever), I just could not keep up. Too much opinion. Too many words! Also too woke; the tone of the NYer noticeably, sadly devolved in the last two-three years.
But if you are still a fan, good for you. Here’s a whole podcast spun off the caption contest you might enjoy.