Arnold Zwicky's Blog

The cartoon caption contest drawing in the most recent New Yorker:

(#1) Drawing by Michael Maslin, Contest #609, March 26, 2018

What elements do you need to recognize to compose a caption?

First, the setting: a subway station, perhaps a version of this NYC station:

(#2)

Then, the thing on the tracks. Apparently a sub, a submarine sandwich, presumably from the Subway chain, like this one:

(#3) Subway turkey bacon avocado sub

[The finalist captions, from the April 9th issue:

“We can take this and transfer to the B.L.T. at Forty-second.”

“It’s more amazing that it arrived on schedule.”

“They did say it would take a hero to fix the M.T.A.”]

[And the winner, in the magazine’s April 23rd issue: “We can take this and transfer to the B.L.T. at Forty-second.” (which got my vote)]

This entry was posted on March 21, 2018 at 7:42 pm and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, Understanding comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.