Style Conversational Week 1368: 'Cryptic, enigmatic and stupid as possible’
How Bob Staake puts together the Style Invitational cartoon caption contests

Bob Staake's sketches for possible cartoons for the Week 1368 caption contest. The Empress opted for A, D, E and F, with some modifications. (Bob Staake for The Washington Post )
By 
Pat Myers 
Jan. 23, 2020 at 4:39 p.m. EST
One of the most valuable aspects of The Style Invitational — second to the Loser Community itself — is our Cartoonist Since Year 2, Bob Staake. Bob’s first illustration for the Invite was a fill-in gig in Week 54, in March 1994, but by May 1 the Czar had announced that the Invitational was switching artists, from Marc Rosenthal to Bob. And on Week 82, that October, the first caption contest featuring Bob’s cartoons appeared. Since then, the Staake cartoon contests have appeared at least twice a year — in addition, of course, to his illustration for the new contest virtually every week for the past 26 years.

And for the last 800-plus of those weeks, I’ve had the delightful task of working with Bob, to bounce ideas off his mind and, perhaps more often, to seek his ideas as well. And when we have the caption contests — like Week 1368 this week — it’s Bob who runs the show; I’m just the referee. I just say “we need a cartoon contest this week” and he just gins up the ideas on his own. I thought I’d share this week (with Bob’s permission) his initial sketches along with the final.

Bob Staake's final versions for this week's Style Invitational, complete with colorful people who perhaps might be talking. (For The Washington Post)
Bob Staake's final versions for this week's Style Invitational, complete with colorful people who perhaps might be talking. (For The Washington Post)
I emailed Bob over the weekend to remind him that this would be a good week for captions, and on Tuesday, as usual, he sent me a page of nine sketches. (Sometimes he’s sent me as many as 15 — the man just can’t help but create and create.)

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After immediately ruling out the grrrrosss Picture I, with the magician, I considered the rest. I ruled out Picture B because a year or so ago, we ran a cartoon with a woman standing atop a file cabinet in the office; it seemed a bit too similar. G would have brought in 79 jokes about CVS receipts. The others all looked promising — zany and ambiguous enough to generate some wildly different and funny interpretations — except for one problem: While some of the captions we run are descriptions of the cartoon, most of the funniest ink features lines of dialogue. So I needed cartoons in which at least one person might be saying something.

So take a look at Sketch A in the final (now labeled B): Bob added a second person in the doorway. The people in what’s now D, standing around the pedestal, can obviously be seen as speaking. And while he didn’t open the mouths of the people in C, we can assume that they’re talking with gritted teeth. And even the lady in B, who’s sitting alone with her mouth closed, might maybe be talking to someone out of the picture? (That one in particular might benefit from a narrative caption rather than a quote.)

Also, I never need to remind Bob that the people shouldn’t all be Caucasian, heterosexual, etc.; I knew that when he sent the final art his very morning that there’d be a wide variety, and this time he even went purple. (My great pal Eddie Alvarez, who designs and arranges pages in the Sunday Arts & Style section, took it upon himself to move the Invite today to the back page, which has color — a major reconfiguration at the last minute — so that Purple Lady in Picture A will be clearer to print-paper readers. I am so grateful for that!)

Bob might have been inspired by yet another children’s book he’s writing and illustrating: As he posted on Facebook just yesterday, along with some samples of the art: “For as long as I’ve written and illustrated them, I’ve always tried to make sure that my books reflected diversity in their characters, but then I learned to use color in a far more effective way. By making the skin tone of my characters pink, brown, yellow, blue and even green I’d always have everyone ‘covered,’ so to speak. These may only be background characters in the book I’m currently working on (“I’m a Snowplow” — Little Golden Books/Random House) but there’s no reason that they can’t reflect the rainbow.”

 
Bob Staake's first Style Invitational illustration, an example for Week 54 in 1994.  [Marcia Brady training a pistol on Mr. Bill, who cries "OH NOOO!" Caption: If Marcia Brady married Mr. Bill, she would become Marcia Brady Bill." (EJC)]

Some final words from Bob today about drawing the Invite caption art: “When I do these cartoons I sort of have to put myself into a trance-like state and let my pen aimlessly wander around on the paper like a drifter/hobo. My hope is that the drawings are as cryptic, enigmatic and stupid as possible — and still getting paid by The Post. Maybe in the future we should do a contest wherein the losers write pithy captions and then i’m forced to illustrate them, or better yet, maybe the Empress could illustrate them. Pat has always maintained that she can’t draw a straight line, and I always have to remind her that most illustrations are comprised of curvy lines, and once you hit your 60s, very shaky lines.”

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Well, leaving me out of it: I’m not sure whether Bob is thinking about a contest where the Losers create the idea of a cartoon along with the caption and Bob does the drawing, or if he means that they’d submit some open-ended ideas for captions and Bob would interpret them in that inimitable Staakian way. I think either one would lead to good results, but I’m not sure it makes sense to award prizes to people’s vague prompts.

We did have a reverse cartoon contest back in 2007 (gawd, feels like yesterday). We gave the choice of captions; you described the cartoon; Bob drew the top winners and we ran your descriptions of the rest. Here’s my intro to that contest, Week 725:

1. Old dog learns new trick. 2. When Harry met Sally Forth. 3. “No, no, Sonia! It was supposed to be a harmonica!” 4. Watson discovers Sherlock’s secret. 5. Bob just wasn’t a “word person.” 6. The Founding Fathers wept. 7. A small error in pronunciation can have huge consequences. 8. Just remember, no underpants!

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Harry Truman is at a table with Sally Forth. She is yammering, “So then Ralph said he thought the department should be reorganized and I pointed out that it was just like a man to blah blah blah …”

Harry looks at her balefully. Above his head, in a thought balloon, is a vision of her chair, with a mushroom cloud over it.

“A few weeks ago, the Empress received an urgent communique from a figure in her distant past: the Czar of The Style Invitational, who was evidently getting a bit restless out there in “retirement” on the Siberian steppes. “I have a great idea for an Invitational,” it burbled with characteristic modesty. “It may be the best and most original and most fantastic in the entire history of the written word.”

“Yes?

“ ‘What about a REVERSE caption contest? We supply the captions, they come up with what the cartoon should be (just a written summary). Staake draws the winner and runners-up.’

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The Empress expressed certain reservations, citing the well-established 1,000-to-1 word-picture-worth ratio and possibly using the words “idiotic” and “doomed.” "

—

In the introduction to the results four weeks later, the Empress “concedes that her fears were unfounded, and therefore owes the Czar the heart cut out of her chest.”

So we’ll see. Meanwhile, have fun this week.

Good griddance*: The results of the Week 1364 reverse crossword
*Headline suggested by seven people and anyway was used for Week 1294

Many of the twists on the interpretations of crossword clues in our reverse crosswords, as in today’s results of Week 1364, are much the same jokes as in our several earlier installments of this contest. But of course, your typical Washington Post reader isn’t going to have earlier years’ contest results printed out alongside the current one, balanced on the vanity opposite the toilet seat. What’s more, it’s a contest that a less obsessive Loser might try; while the pool of entries didn’t approach that of our typical foal name contest, I did hear from a lot of people who hadn’t sent anything in years, along with a healthy does of new names. (Congratulations, First Offender Neil Greenberg!)

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Using a Sunday crossword rather than a daily one turned out not to make that much of a difference, surprisingly; perhaps it’s that this particular grid had so many three-letter words that it was harder to work with. Anyway, I still tossed ink by the 55-gallon drum: 53 blots among 39 Losers (including double credits).
It’s the thirtieth win for Lose Cannoneer Tom Witte, the Invite’s second-highest-inking Loser, behind Chris Doyle. Tom has entered the Invitational virtually every week since its founding; his first ink was in Week 7. Still, you don’t get 1,576 blots of ink by just showing up. While he’s most renowned for sex jokes, especially rather cynical ones about dating, Tom went for just plain funny to describe INTHELAPOFLUXURY as being “a better place to be than in the armpit of luxury.” Runners-up Frank Osen and Jeff Contompasis are also Big Invite Names, and fourth-place Sam Mertens, while still in his rookie year, is showing all the happy (for me, anyway) signs of Burgeoning Invite Obsessiveness: since he debuted in just Week 1323, Sam’s already blotted 44 inks, including his three today.

What Doug Dug: Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood most liked Jeff’s runner-up for MOOLA (“It’s obtained by milking a cash cow,” a definition that edged out several similar ones; Frank’s runner-up OHOH (“a snack cake way past its sell-by date”); and, from the honorable mentions, both definitions of AAR: “What a doctor tells a pirate to say” (Gary Crockett) and “An organization for the not-so-OK boomers who can’t hold their P” (Kevin Dopart); Jesse Frankovich’s CATHODE, a poem to a catheter, which nosed out two different odes to Cathy of comic strip fame; and Loser From Way Back Mike Hammer’s OMA: “Gawd’s first name.” (Mike, by the way, was the person who suggested our foal name contest in 1994; he’ll sometimes still enter, when he’s not busy playing the ponies for real.)

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A little point of housekeeping: I just heard this while typing the Conversational this afternoon, but I was told that The Post plans to drop a number of lesser-read email newsletters, including the one from me that tells readers about the new Invitational and Conversational each week. I’ve already asked the powers that be to change their minds, but I’m going to think about how else I can let readers know each week about the contest. Certainly, if you have a Facebook account, please join the Style Invitational Devotees group at on.fb.me/invdev; I post links to the Invite and Convo there the moment I publish them online, Thursday morning and late afternoon respectively.

Also, I’ll resume posting the Invitational to Twitter from the account @StyleInvite; I’ll then retweet it from @PatMyersTWP. So follow either of those accounts, which I haven’t been using much lately but will if people look at them.