In Drew Dernavich’s cartoon, a young couple stands over a crib. Someone, presumably their baby, has been drawing tally marks on the wall next to the crib. The father is speaking.
Convicts mark the passage of time by scratching tally marks on the walls of their prison cells, so all my captions draw a connection between babies and convicts:
- “Remember the racket he made dragging his sippy cup across the bars?”
- “Let’s find a really cute picture for the wanted poster.”
- “With good behavior, he’ll be out in two years.”
- “No one likes solitary confinement.”
- “His first word was shiv.”
This caption alludes to the standard prison outfit: “Let’s try a onesie that isn’t orange.”
And here are a few puns:
- “He still hasn’t completed his first sentence.”
- “He needs more time in the yard.”
- “Not all babies are innocent.”
Now let’s see how you did.
There were a lot of puns, and these were the best:
- “We should let her spend more time in the yard.”
- “He almost completed his first sentence.”
- “He’s not handling solitary well.”
- “He was in for resisting a rest.”
- “She used to be so innocent.”
- “Well, he was given life.”
- “It was a hard labor.”
I wasn’t expecting any sex jokes this week, but this one is great: “He was conceived during a conjugal visit.”
I like this caption—“Do you still feel lucky?”—but it might be better if the last word were “blessed.”
This caption suggests that the parents are at least partly responsible for their child’s convict-like behavior: “Maybe we shouldn’t have gotten him that tin sippy cup.”
The following six entries focus on the actual number of tally marks:
- “I’m worried about her math skills. She’s only been in there eleven days.”
- “This is number 14, I mean, this is Kelly, your new babysitter.”
- “Do you think we owe the sitter for the full two weeks?”
- “Only 6,558 days until she’s off to college…”
- “They did warn us about the teens.”
One of you suggested the baby deserves to be treated like a prisoner: “He did rob us of our sleep and kill our sex life.”
These three entries take a common phrase and give it new meaning within the context of the cartoon:
- “Well, we can’t say the writing wasn’t on the wall.”
- “We should have seen the writing on the wall.”
- “The writing’s on the wall.”
This entry takes a well-deserved shot at parents who are too focused on getting their kids into the right schools—“We better get on that reform school waiting list.”—but it buries the punchline: Here’s an alternate version that puts the punchline at the end, where it belongs: “We should get on the waiting list for that reform school.”
Like one of my captions, these entries highlight the importance of a baby’s first utterance:
- “This explains why her first word was parole.”
- “His first word was ‘Attica.'”
Here’s another Attica reference that alludes not just to the prison but to its place in the prisoners’ rights movement: “Why does he keep chanting Attica?” It’s not easy to joke about this country’s bloodiest prison riot—one that just marked its fiftieth anniversary—but that caption works.
I can’t actually tell whether the baby is in the crib, but the following entries suggest he escaped:
- “He certainly wasn’t released for good behavior.”
- “He was here just a couple weeks ago.”
- “I doubt it was a clean getaway.”
- “He couldn’t have gotten far.”
- “He’ll never get far on foot.”
- “I knew he would walk.”
I’ll end this commentary with three terrific captions that don’t fit neatly into any category:
- “At least he stopped asking the governor for a pardon.”
- “I don’t know whether to be proud or horrified.”
- “So much for adopting from Rikers.”
Choosing this week’s winner was not easy. I’m not a fan of puns, but I really liked “He was in for resisting a rest.” Nevertheless, my favorite entry was, “He was conceived during a conjugal visit.”
By the way, I am, for the 12th time, a finalist in the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest. I lost the last three times I was a finalist, and I’m hoping to break that streak. So if you think my entry is the funniest, consider casting a vote for it.