CARTOON CAPTION/ANTI-CAPTION CONTESTS CONTINUE!

The Cartoon Caption Contest careened into a new milestone today, crowning its 75th winner. But that's not all! The winner turned out to be none other than Carl Gable of Norcross, Georgia--who had already won Caption Contest #40 (with "Well, that was abominable.") Well, that makes dear Mr. Gable the first contestant to win twice--and he's actually won three times if you can believe his claim to have won one of the prehistoric annual contests that came before the current string of near-weekly captioning bouts.

Of course, this means I've put Mr. Gable on The Map a second time.

As you can imagine, Emily "Emdashes" Gordon and I have been terribly excited about all this. As many of you already know thanks to Gawker, Emily even scored a journoblogolistic coup by posting this great interview with Mr. Gable this afternoon. And I swear I'd love her interview even if she hadn't kicked it off with two questions that I provided to her. Anyway, as a longtime contest loser, I think I have a lot to learn from Mr. Gable's insights, but I also suspect I'm too dense to absorb any of his wisdom.

But wait! There's even more big news out in Captionstan!! Over at Newsweek, Ramin Setoodehs looked behind the Cartoon Caption Contest Curtain and discovered that 23-year-old Harvard graduate Zachary Kanin is the hurdle that all contestants must overcome on their way to victory. What the article doesn't reveal is that young Kanin is himself a New Yorker cartoonist--check out his gallery here. And it seems like just yesterday that the cartoon gatekeeper was goofing around with the Harvard Lampoon. And it actually was just yesterday (as well as other days) that Kanin's sets appeared in The 13 Clocks, a family-friendly Republic Theater Company production (in association with New Yorker cartoon editor Robert Mankoff) that runs at The Cherry Lane Theater through December 23. It seems that Kanin is off to a great start in this crazy ol' town--and the bribes he'll get from me and other desperate contestants should only help him on his way to the proverbial top of the heap. Way to go, able Kanin!

I think I learned about the Newsweek article via Dan Radosh, who this week drew his own curtain aside to explain how he chose the nominees for one of his recent Anti-Caption Contests. More about that in the following contest summaries....


By winning Caption Contest #75 (corporate meeting around grand piano) with

“Hmm. What rhymes with layoffs?”

Carl Gable became the first two-time/three-time winner, advanced Georgia into a tie with North Carolina for fifth place, perpetuated The East Coast Streak, and also snookered New York, home state/home city of his two competitors.


The nominees in Caption Contest #77 (man and boy watching Amazing Colossal Woman holding car over Chevrolet factory) are

"Son, we finally attracted the fifty-foot-and-over demographic!"
Joel Herm (Oregon, WI)

"You know, I couldn't have done it without your mother."
Scott Fitzpatrick (Westfield, NJ)

"Son, one day all this will be yours. Except her."
Michael Embley (Tiburon, CA)

My loser:

"This is awesome, but I still think the three of us would be better off with a Suburban."

Thanks for nothing, Kanin!


The winner in Anti-Caption Contest #77 is

"Remember, Bobby, all women are monsters."
J

The nominees in Anti-Caption Contest #78 (elongated man-woman couple in bed behind bars, by cell door) are

"Look at him staring at us through the bars of his crib. I wonder what he's thinking?"
Deborah

"marriage is like prison."
michael

"If I were a contestant on Deal or No Deal, I'd tell Howie that I was going to select the models in order from the skinniest to the fattest. Then I'd watch all the pretty girls cry."
Kevin G

My losers:

"That was conjugal."

"Honey, you put the 'con' in conjugal...." [apologies to gary]

"Okay, it's true. I'm the one who farted."

"We are prisoners of our passion, which burns almost as brightly as my Tiparillo."

Dan Radosh feebly attempts to explain his selection process here.


Caption Contest #79 is here. Anti-Caption Contest #79 is here.


THE STANDINGS
Here is the current New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest breakdown by state. You can find it all mapped out here.

12 California

10 New York (9 from the Big Apple)

7 New Jersey

6 Massachusetts
6 Pennsylvania

3 Georgia (includes two-time winner Carl Gables)
3 North Carolina

2 Connecticut (both women, both from New Haven)
2 District of Columbia
2 Illinois
2 Maryland (both women, neither named Mary)
2 Minnesota
2 New Hampshire
2 Texas
2 Utah

1 Arizona
1 Iowa
1 Mississippi
1 Missouri
1 New Mexico
1 Ohio
1 Oklahoma
1 Oregon
1 Rhode Island
1 Vermont
1 Virginia
1 Washington

Map Introduction

Thanks to Andriy Bidochko for Map Builder.

Image by David Marc Fischer using Samsung cameraphone