This month’s contest featured a drawing by New Yorker cartoonist Jason Chatfield, who joined our judges’ panel to help select the winning entry and five runners-up. His drawing is set in a bar where a baby is sitting on a stool, looking down at his shot glass, and saying something to the bartender and other customer. Jason grew up in Perth, Australia, where his parents owned a pub, and he said the cartoon is almost like a journal entry.
Jason’s original caption was, “Leave the bottle.” That’s terrific, if a little obvious, and I asked him whether he had submitted it to The New Yorker before letting us use it for the CartoonStock contest. He said he did, but The New Yorker rejected it on the grounds that some readers might be offended by the sight of a baby drinking alcohol. Assuming such humorless readers exist, they should not be allowed to dictate the magazine’s standards.
Several of you submitted Jason’s original caption as your own entry, and one of you changed it to “Just leave the bottle,” a modification that Jason liked.
Many of you transformed an ordinary statement—in this case, something a depressed drunk might say to his bartender—into a fitting caption that reconciled the two disparate elements: babies and barflies.
- “She got tired of trying to change me.”
- “And then she just pushed me out.”
- “All I want to do is drink and cry.”
- “Each time, it’s something new.”
- “She said she doesn’t want kids.”
- “I can’t just crawl back to her.”
- “No one understands me.”
- “I fell off the wagon.”
- “I need a change.”
- “I’m so wiped.”
These entries take ordinary statements and change them just slightly to address the fact that the drunk is a baby:
- “If that’s my babysitter, I’m not here.”
- “Don’t tell my midwife I’m here.”
- “Somebody call me a stroller.
- “Somebody call me a stork.”
- “It’s 3 a.m. somewhere.”
- “It’s 5 a.m. somewhere.”
The last two captions are nearly identical, but the “5 a.m.” joke (which two people submitted) is superior because it’s closer to what people actually say to justify day-drinking.
Here’s the month’s best pun (which Bob liked): “And for this I gave up free womb and board.”
Here’s the best Jewish joke (which I loved, in part because it came out of left field): “You think you had a rough day? Ever hear of a bris?”
And here are the best sex/relationship jokes, which I didn’t expect in a contest that featured a baby:
- “And then it hit me—I’m sleeping with my mother.”
- “Why do I always go home with an older woman?”
- “I just got out of a very short-distance relationship.”
- “Apparently, it was just a playdate to her.”
- “Where’s the babes?”
Trevor Hoey, a New Yorker cartoonist who helps judge every month’s contest, liked this entry, which suggests that the baby thinks he’s entitled to a reward for doing something annoying: “Can I get a beer, for crying out loud?” It might work better, however, without the comma.
This entry reminded me of the SNL skits featuring Adam Grossman, the six-year-old Benihana customer (played by Jonah Hill) with the soul of a Catskill comedian, who’s always making jokes he says he doesn’t understand: “I’m lactose intolerant…and I don’t even know what that means.”
Here are decent jokes about:
Breastfeeding: “I miss it on tap.”
Baby formula: “Another bottle of white.”
And making sure the baby formula you’ve just warmed up on the stove is not too hot: “Don’t shake it or stir it, just splash it on your wrist.”
I like both these references to Alcoholics Anonymous:
- “I can barely manage the one-step program.”
- “I’m in a First-Few-Steps program.”
Perhaps because this contest straddled two years, beginning in December 2023 and ending in January 2024, some of you assumed the child is Baby New Year, the personification of the start of the New Year:
- “The worst part is, I used the hat and sash as collateral.”
- “It all started when I realized I was an election year.”
This entry is funny but doesn’t really make sense: “I’m not drunk. I’m nonverbal.” How could a nonverbal baby say that? Jason pointed out that the line would work better as a thought bubble.
We all loved this caption—“Would one of you help my dad up off the floor?”—in part because it makes the reader imagine a person who’s not pictured in the drawing, and because the idea of a parent who’s irresponsible enough to bring a baby to a bar and then get black-out drunk is, in a dark way, very funny.
This caption suggests that the baby is unexpectedly worried about mortality: “Another day closer to death.”
And this one suggests that he’s depressed about the thought of losing his status as an only child: “They’re having another.”
Congratulations to JOE AYELLA, who won the contest with an Oedipal joke: “And then it hit me—I’m sleeping with my mother.” The five runners-up are:
- “Would one of you help my dad up off the floor?”
- “I can barely manage the one-step program.”
- “She got tired of trying to change me.”
- “She said she doesn’t want kids.”
- “It’s 5 a.m. somewhere.”
If you who want to see how we made our selections, we recorded the process and posted it here. And if you want to pre-order my book on the caption contest, and I really hope you do, click on the following link: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250333407