Style Conversational Week 1130: What IS that cartoon? Take your pic.
 
To me, a lot of the fun in cartoon captions lies with the variety

(Cartoons by Bob Staake for The Washington Post; see bit.ly/invite1130 for the winning captions)
By Pat MyersJune 25, 2015
We’re starting off this week’s online Style Invitational with the results rather than the new contest (they’re side by side in print): For one thing, the art at the top of the page comprises the four Bob Staake cartoons whose captions we share today. But also they’re really funny.

While many of this week’s winners — especially those for Picture 1, the painter — would be funny in their own right as stand-alone captions, I always enjoy sharing several captions (sometimes a dozen per cartoon) that have widely differing interpretations for a single picture. Picture 4, especially: We have Hitler’s mustache, of course, but also Oliver Hardy’s. Not to mention a hula skirt, Satan’s bangs, tassels from pasties, and a Yorkie hanging from a towel ring. I think this makes the Invite’s caption results that much more fun to read than the big-deal caption contest from The New Yorker, whose editors post three finalists for one cartoon, and then invite readers to vote for the winner.

Speaking of! This very week, 30-time Loser Kathy El-Assal is one of The New Yorker’s three finalists. You have till June 28 to vote for her caption here (remember to click “Submit” at the bottom). If she wins, she’ll join Gary Crockett and Jay Shuck in the baby pool of New Yorker-winning Losers.


There was more duplication than usual in the Invite this time around (perhaps because I used only four cartoons this time, rather than the five to seven we’ve used in many of our 50 or so past caption contests). Both Picture 1 and Picture 4 drew numerous captions about selfies; and as I mentioned in the intro to the results, Wonder Woman and “the buck stops here” inspired dozens of entries among the 1,500 or so that I received. Lots also about carless drivers (I went with Ward Kay’s dig at Bing) and dozens with “the %#@*& stops here.”

(It’s not a problem on the print page, but unfortunately the captions for Pictures 3 and 4 end up far from the pictures themselves online. I suggest right-clicking on the art, then selecting “Open in new tab”; then you can toggle back and forth between cartoon and caption.)

Not all that often, a winning caption convinces you that Bob Staake must have had that joke in mind all along (though I guarantee he didn’t). This week’s Inkin’ Memorial winner, Jeff Shirley’s “put it in cursive,” has that rightness. Though Jeff didn’t start entering the Invite until Week 1005, he now is pushing 90 blots of ink (most scored in the past year or so), including 13 “above the fold.” And it’s his second Inkin’ Memorial; the first was from Week 1032, in which he discovered satanic messages in the aggressively wholesome comic “The Family Circus”:


F is the sixth letter of the alphabet; assigning the other proper numbers gives you F+A+M+I+L+Y = 6+1+13+9+12+25 = 66!
There are 6 letters in CIRCUS.
So: FAMILY CIRCUS: 666!
Now, look at the hidden message in the members of this “wholesome” family:

GrandMa; JeffY
Dolly; BARfy; Kittycat;
BiLly; P.J.: Peter JOhn; GRanDdad:
MY DARK LORD!
Jeff Hazle was one of a half-dozen Losers who identified the serene lady in Cartoon 3 as Hillary Clinton, but his timely wordplay was the cleverest by far. Jeff has an especially high above-the-fold ratio, with 11 of his 52 blots of ink finishing in the Losers’ Circle. I do hope that Jeff doesn’t derive too much pleasure from shooting flies dead with his prize.

Roger Dalrymple scores with the trick — we always have at least one example of this — of noticing some interesting detail of the picture, in this case that the lady in Picture 3 has breasts identical to her eyelids. (Actually, a few others noted this, but Roger tied them together with the idea of plastic surgery.) By the way, Roger once again will be leading his battlefield tour after the annual Gettysburg Loser Brunch (maybe I should make that “Loser Brunch of Gettysburg,” since you don’t have to be affiliated with the Confederate Army to attend). That outing is scheduled for Sunday, Aug. 16; we usually carpool up there from the D.C. area. Stay tuned for more details.


And Danielle Nowlin scores yet another Loser Mug or Grossery Bag by going the pithy route with Cartoon 2, edging out many other entries joking on the pronunciation of the name on the plate.

Laugh Out of Courtney: Copy chief Courtney Rukan is back from vacation and sent me a long list of faves for Week 1126:

“Among the top four, Roger Dalrymple’s third-place entry made me laugh out loud. Dirty, dirty mind,” Courtney says. Courtney also singled out John Burton’s “Make a PROFIT, Muhammad” (“very clever – and ballsy”); Sylvia Betts’s “do not wipe off the numbers”; Robyn Carlson’s joke about the artist’s two missing ears (also noted by several); Andrew Hoenig’s Weiner joke; Dudley Thompson’s about Mrs. Whistler; Frank Osen’s “Wingdings font”; Mike Gips’s foulmouthed Bert of “Sesame Street”; the doubly credited “hoverbroad” for Picture 3; the Bride of the Invisible Man, by Bird Waring (and also Bird’s “Satan grows bangs”); Mark Raffman’s boob tassel and appendectomy scar; and Larry McClemons’s horeshoe/toothbrush.


I can see that if Courtney had my job, she’d spend as much time as I do fretting over what should get ink.

What Doug Dug: “All the winners were great,” ace copy editor Doug Norwood agrees correctly. Doug also gave shout-outs to the Bert entry and to Todd DeLap’s on Truman’s middle name; Ward Kay’s Bing zinger; and Doug Frank’s “fade-off Hitler.”

There’s just one great unprintable entry this week, but it’s a doozy; see the bottom of this page only if you aren’t going to be upset by callous tastelessness.

Encore! Another go at the foreign-phrase pun contest

It’s almost a running joke about how reluctant I am to try a new contest that someone suggests, and in 2011 (possibly earlier) I gave the standard reasons to Loser Malcolm Fleschner for why his idea for a foreign-phrase contest wouldn’t work: It would be too obscure, everyone would use the same phrases, etc.


Of course, the Week 936 contest was a huge hit. And even though Chris Doyle didn’t remember it when suggesting it recently as a new idea (given that he’s entered perhaps 800 Invite contests, I’ll give him a pass), it produced one of my favorite sets of results. If you’re entering Week 1130, do look at the results of Week 936 so you don’t send the same joke.

The top winners that week:
The winner of the Inker: Cogito ergo bum: Sudden realization of graduating philosophy majors. (Greg Deye, Kensington, a First Offender)

2. Altar ego: “I do, and so does she.” (Jim Reagan, Herndon, Va.)

3. Après moi le deluxe: My wife’s run off with a millionaire. (Barrie Collins, Long Sault, Ontario)

4. Bon voltage: What you wish a homeowner as the sky grows dark and the wind whips up. (Robert Schechter, Dix Hills, N.Y.)


In case people didn’t know one or two of the actual foreign phrases, I embedded a link to a definition or use of each one in the online version. I’ll do that again. You don’t have to do it with your entry; in fact, please don’t embed any links within entries, because when I combine all the entries, the links turn into long strings of garbly text right in the middle of your prose. Anyway, if I can’t figure out the original from your alteration, it’s probably too wildly altered.

What counts as foreign? If the expression came from another language, it’s okay, even if it’s also been an English term for a long time, like “alter ego.” So you have lots and lots to use — even the same phrases used in Week 936, if your joke is entirely different.

Dine to meet you: Come to the Loser Brunch this Sunday


Various Losers and I are heading for Chadwicks pub, near the river in Old Town Alexandria, for brunch at noon on Sunday. Right now, it’s a pretty intimate gathering, and so we can definitely fit in other brunchers. Here’s the pretty extensive brunch menu; the food is good. RSVP to Elden Carnahan so we’ll know how big a table to save.

The Scarlet Cartoon

A number of people spelled out various profanities that constituted the name in Picture 2, but the Scarlet Letter this week goes to another one for the same picture, alluding to something missing from the man’s body:

“Of course this is the Thalidomide Resource Center, you twit.”

Thank you, Jack McBroom. Or not.