caption this

OK: I hate the New Yorker caption contest.  Hate it.  Makes me want to cancel my subscription, or scrabble off my own face.  I'd like to think it's secretly some kind of super-snobby statement on their part, sorta going undercover to prove that humor is not in fact democratic—but I'm afraid it's instead that kind of snobbier-than-snobby pretentiousness that Woody Allen displayed with the miserable Small Time Crooks and then the even more soul-crushing Curse of the Jade Scorpion: an effort to demonstrate (read: fabricate) populist credentials, from "above"...like, "Look, we're not so fancy, we invite any old person to decide what's funny!"*

The results are disastrous:

(click to enlarge if you can stand it)

First, this week's winner: "Guess who's getting voted off the island."  Ah, yes.  A Survivor joke.  That takes me back.  I guess it's no surprise that The New Yorker's readership would be tickled by junk-cultural references from the year 2000, but does this kid of pre-9/11 dicksmackery really belong on the magazine's last page?  If I'm not mistaken, that's where they used to put their "Shouts & Murmurs."  Now it's more like...Farts and Burbles?  (Hey, I never said I should be writing the captions.)

And the finalists?  Only Sean Delaney's even resembles humor: the reality-show one is just another lame cultural reference (again painfully unfresh), and the third one is...um...well, isn't it basically just, "Hey, this is weird!  This is unlikely!  What a strange situation, a huge bird and a tiny little man up in a tree!"

Which brings us to the correct answer to The New Yorker's caption contest: "Christ, what an asshole."  Whoever figured that one out—Charles Lavoie, I gather—did our country a great service.  It's certainly the right caption for this week's contest.  Has anyone thought to try and anticipate the kind of bullshit people will come up with instead?  OK, let's see...judge, fucked-up courtroom...so what does he say?  Oh, wait wait wait, I've got one: "Order!"  Yeah, that's good!**  Or, or, or, "OK, whose bright idea was it to call the Incredible Hulk to the witness stand?"  Hahahah!  Brilliant!  What else?  I'm sure there's some great joke to be made about prosecuting Hurricane Katrina, yeah!  That happened just a couple years ago, it's about time somebody made a joke about it—and it totally makes sense that a hurricane would have torn through the courtroom, I mean, that's what it looks like!  Ooh, or maybe something about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton at each other's throats?

Oh, man, I can't wait to see next week's entries!

* The irony of course being that the real biting criticism of The New Yorker's cartoons isn't that they're so elitist but that they're just not fucking funny...and the caption contest takes that to incredible new heights.  Er, depths.

** Actually I kind of like that one.