Bob Mankoff, The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest, and The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest Book were featured in The New York Times
The Editor of Laughs
IF incongruity is the essence of humor, then Robert Mankoff, the cartoon editor of The New Yorker for the past 11 years, is a perfect study. At 64, with wavy silver hair and rectangular glasses, he has a professorial manner, but he is prone to go off on surprising tangents about everything from juggling (he keeps leather-covered balls in his office for when the mood strikes) to hair care products. “I need to go to mousse school,” he said one afternoon at his desk, trying to tamp down a few flyaway strands.
A self-proclaimed “undocumented” Ph.D. in psychology — he dropped out of a doctoral program at Queens College in the mid-’70s to become a cartoonist — Mr. Mankoff, who grew up in Flushing, Queens, is serious about humor. In 1991, he founded the Cartoon Bank, which eventually became a digital archive of New Yorker cartoons and cover art, and in 1999, along with David Remnick, his editor in chief, Mr. Mankoff inaugurated the magazine’s cartoon caption contest.
On Oct. 14, more than one million entries later, a hardcover volume titled “The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest Book: The Winners, the Losers and Everybody in Between” will be published. Mr. Mankoff will also discuss the contest at the annual New Yorker Festival.
The whimsical, cerebral Mr. Mankoff still draws, and one of his cartoons — in which a businessman yells into a telephone: “No, Thursday’s out. How about never — is never good for you?” — is among the most popular in the magazine’s history. On a recent day in his office, surrounded by stacks of the sketches that cartoonists fax in for consideration every week, he shared some tricks of the trade.
The first caption contest was a moment of necessity. We needed a back page for the Cartoon Issue. I remember seeing caption contests in Punch magazine in the ’60s and ’70s. I didn’t invent the idea of a caption contest, but I suggested it. The idea for the contest in its present form is David’s. I think he was inspired by the crossword puzzle in The Sunday Times; you always know it’s there, and it’s standard.
I think what makes someone good at writing captions is the ability to be very free in their thinking. Humor is essentially a type of play. If you try to solve this like you would answer an SAT question, you will fail. Part of it has to be loosey-goosey. When you look at one of these things, you have to let your mind be free, let your unconscious or subconscious do the processing. You can’t go through enough possibilities.
People like to say: “What’s the funniest caption? What’s the funniest joke?” It’s like saying, “What’s the best-tasting food?” It doesn’t actually make much sense. People’s taste in humor differs. Some people like wordplay and puns; I don’t, particularly, because it seems to me those are the only types of jokes that eventually will be able to be done by computer. Of course, a great pun is something else. Some people like humor that is aggressive. No one’s really suffering because it’s only a cartoon, but something bad is happening to somebody — and it’s not us. Then there are other people who like absurdity.
In one of the caption contests, there are parrots on all the people’s shoulders in a boardroom. So you start to associate. Parrots repeat things — people will talk about parroting. Also, parrots poop on you, so there will be a lot of dry-cleaner jokes. The one that actually won, which combined both absurdity and aggression, was “Shut up, Bob, everyone knows your parrot’s a clip-on.” Imagine trying to explain that to someone who is not a native English speaker, who doesn’t know your culture. They’d say: “But I am confused! You are wearing a parrot — this is part of a fashion?” No, you somehow accept that absurdity.
A lot of studies show that people who like that kind of humor tend to like more adventurous things in art, more modern music, and they tend to be more liberal in their politics. Just more adventurous in general. Probably if you look at people’s patterns, not only what they submit but also what they vote on, you start to see a profile of someone’s sense of humor.
I think the society socializes men to be more forthcoming with humor from the start. Women usually mean by “a good sense of humor” someone who makes them laugh, and men mean someone who laughs at their jokes.
There are a lot of winners from both New York and California. We’re very well represented on both coasts. But we’ve had winners from an awful lot of states. Still, bantering and joking around and seeing things in a funny way, maybe a cynical way, even a skeptical way, is second nature for New Yorkers.
It’s funny. Maybe I’m going somewhere in a cab or giving a speech, and somehow it’ll come up that I am the cartoon editor of The New Yorker. People will come up and show me their caption and say, “Honestly, was my caption not better than the ones that won?” Every once in a while, they’ll come up and ask me to explain a caption.
I think there’s something interesting about people not understanding cartoons. I go to universities, and there are incredibly smart people who are totally flummoxed by the caption contest. It’s not easy. There’s no way that the usual things you do yield a result. You have to sort of dream it.
Solving the caption contest shows you conceivably what the future is — creating world peace, or solving global warming. When you have an interconnected community all thinking about the same thing, you can get pretty good results.
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