Your Caption Has Been Selected: More Than Anyone Could Possibly Want to Know About the ‘New Yorker’ Cartoon Caption Contest

Wood, a Chicago lawyer who has won the New Yorker’s caption contest eight times, debuts with a diverting overview of the contest’s history and offers tips on how to win it. After the magazine’s cartoon editor Bob Mankoff introduced the contest in 1999, it grew quickly in popularity and drew thousands of entries from ordinary readers and even such celebrities as composer John Williams, journalist Maureen Dowd, and film critic Roger Ebert, who won in 2011. The task of sifting through 10,000 entries each week fell to Mankoff’s assistants before the magazine decided to crowdsource the first phase of the selection process through an online portal in 2016. Wood outlines 29 suggestions for writing winning captions, recommending that readers “eliminate unnecessary words,” “make the speaker oblivious,” and end captions with the punch line. Wood includes a bounty of cartoons illustrating the advice and serves up plenty of amusing pieces of trivia (Zachary Kanin, Mankoff’s former assistant who went on to write for Saturday Night Live, recalls weeding through entries before crowdsourcing was implemented: “There were always about five hundred submissions that were like, ‘Good news. Now you’re getting a better deal through Geico’ ”). New Yorker readers will get a kick out of this. Illus. Agent: Daniel Greenberg, Levine Greenberg Rostan. (June)