Radosh.net

For instance, how many people are aware that the cartoons used for the contest are originally submitted with captions for inclusion in the magazine proper? Or that cartoonists despise the contest?)

I, for one, but I think I came across that fact here, no? And I think it goes without saying that once you know the first proposition, the second follows pretty automatically.

The question to be answered is, since the "real" contest always picks the bad ones, how come the "anti" version doesn't do the opposite?

zing!

Way to squeeze two pages out of "Some intern reads them all, picks three."

But I really want to hear Chevy Chase's entry. Guaranteed to be the least funny caption of all time.

I think "primitively anxious" describes the ideal conditions for the anti-contest.

Roger Ebert should submit here. The real contest is for chumps. And, apparently, Carl Gable.

I agree with Vance. Deliberately unfunny, with specific guidelines, is mostly unfunnier. What's the point?

They're really more like suggestions.

Congratulations, Daniel Radosh, on the well-deserved recognition, and thanks for the Newsweek article. The extra level of irony of your brilliant Anti-Caption contest often makes it chocolate-milk-squirting-out-of-your-nose funny. I've often thought that many of the entries I read here would be better submitted to the New Yorker contest though, as they are clever and humorous in a conventional way, nothing anti- about them. I myself am a finalist for the week whose results will be announced on Dec. 11 (grand piano in corporate boardroom) for a caption I never would have submitted here. Now that I learn it was chosen out of 7,000 I guess I should be, I dunno, impressed? I've been having fun in your AntiCapCon for a few months now -- my first effort was chosen as a finalist, and I was honored to have won a few weeks ago, and those captions I would never have sent to the New Yorker. Of course I have no objectivity about my ideas -- just screwing around -- but intuitively I think I have the gist of what goes where. I guess I should be totally ashamed that The New Yorker nominated my entry, as I agree their winners do massively suck. As I am a social whore, however, I am reveling in the random comments from well-wishers, so fuck that. (Posted anonymously to keep this experience pure.)

Great mention, but I hope we don't have to compete with 7,000 entries here now.
Radosh may have to get an intern. Perhaps a Huckapoo member can moonlight?

I agree with Vance. Deliberately unfunny, with specific guidelines, is mostly unfunnier.

Thanks for the support, but I wasn't slamming the entries in the anti-caption contest, I was only slamming (mostly gratuitously) Daniel's ability to spot the best ones therein.

Of course that's all subjective, but it's been my experience that now that we get three finalists, they almost invariably strike me as some of the less funny ones (and that includes my own finalist one). Somehow this seems like a bigger error than when a "winner" would be picked that I didn't agree with.

I wonder, though, how much of the experience of the anti-caption contest is based on context, that is, reading the captions in sequence in a thread, which seems to build the humor to a point where a certain caption may come across as gut-bustingly funny where it might not if simply plucked out and placed by itself at the top of the page. This may, in fact, be the secret edge this contest has over the New Yorker one, where only the latter context is ever available to most readers.

Time for another dissertation!

>>now that we get three finalists, they almost invariably strike me as some of the less funny ones

As a current finalist, I totally agree. But "winning" this thing has always been completely beside the point.

My suggestion for this week's "poll" was to vote not on a caption, but on what we should call the kid in last week's cartoon. Which would basically continue the thread, instead of plucking three strands from it. Or something.

Vance wrote:
Thanks for the support, but I wasn't slamming the entries in the anti-caption contest, I was only slamming (mostly gratuitously) Daniel's ability to spot the best ones therein.

My point exactly. Wasn't at all slamming the captions. Most of them are hilarious!

I agree with J. I think having the entries and the winners on completely different scales keeps the entries pure. The rules emphasize "aggressively unfunny" as a potentially winning criterion. The funny entries are just funny for its own sake, uncorrupted and eternal, like a puppy that dies a virgin martyr. Or an exercise in zen where we must learn to divest ourselves of expectations of reward for good work and learn to accept our worst work (possibly requiring more labor) being singled out for recognition.

You know, if people really preferred the old, no-voting system, I'm happy to go back to it. It's certainly less work for me. What say?

As for how I pick. I'm not trying to select boring or not funny captions. Quite the contrary, I choose the anti-captions that make me laugh the most, and yet which could never be winning entries in the real contest. Indeed, I have several times suggested to people who have submitted genuinely good captions here that they send them to the New Yorker (where they are inevitably passed over for less good captions, but that's another story). I also try not to have more than one of each type of anti-caption among the finalists, so if there are two "what looks like a whimsical scenario is actually terribly tragic" entries, for instance, I pick the one I think is funniest.

I don't think Vance's thread-bias suggestion is an issue, though I admit that I don't often put a huge amount of time or effort into making my choices. Usually this means that I'll select up to 15 worthy entries and then pick three based on whatever my gut tells me at that moment. Could I choose differently? Mos def. But this is a hobby for me, and if it starts becoming too onerous, I'm doing something wrong.

That said, if anyone can recall specific instances in which you think I overlooked a worthy entry in favor of a less worthy one, feel free to post that here and I'll happily explain why I made the decision I did.

Let the healing begin!

Please review all of my entries and tell me why you hate them. Also do the same for all of my colleagues. Thanks.

It's my job to sift through the thousands of entries in the real contest. I work overtime every week to get through them all. I've even worked every Saturday and Sunday for the last 4 months. My bosses are always breathing down my neck. And getting naked in front of me. The hours here are obscene.

A Harvard graduate, huh? I just assumed they were outsourcing the job to Reader's Digest.

if anyone can recall specific instances in which you think I overlooked a worthy entry in favor of a less worthy one, feel free to post that here and I'll happily explain why I made the decision I did.

O-ho, aren't you the clever one, Mr. Bond. Now it's up to us to find examples to back up the otherwise baseless charge of constantly overlooking true gems, eh? Is that it?

Well, far be it for me to spend upwards of 20 minutes going through old threads and saying "no, that's not the single best example," so I won't. At least not any further. However, to turn the tables on you once again, Mr. Bond, I have a choice candidate in mind from the current thread, and if you don't pick it, you can bet you'll see that one thrown in your face on Monday. Ha Ha HA HA HA ha ha!...

Now if you'll excuse me, I must attend to my giant destructo ray.

Whoops. That was me. The, um, destructo ray misfired.

"You expect me to talk, Radoshfinger?

"Noooooo Mr. Bond. I expect you to lauguish in obscurity!!!"

Shut up and caption.

Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker... Oh, wait. Fuck.

Not all the cartoonists hate the contest.