In Carolita Johnson’s cartoon, two shirtless men are walking together on the beach. The younger man has an armband tattoo around his left bicep. The older man has a crossword puzzle on his chest. The older man is speaking.
I first imagined where the crossword clues might be tattooed:
- “The clues are on my tramp stamp.”
- “You don’t want to know where I put the clues.”
Armband tattoos signal strength, so I tried to imagine what message the crossword puzzle is meant to convey:
- “You think an armband is tough? Try the Sunday puzzle.”
- “The Sunday puzzle means I’m difficult.”
Tattoos are done with ink, and all but the most confident crossword enthusiasts avoid using ink pens to complete the puzzle. Those two facts inspired my next caption, which suggests that the older man regrets his decision to get a tattoo: “Never do a crossword puzzle in ink.”
Finally, I took a famous line from “Jerry Maguire” and with one comma converted it into a command: “You, complete me.”
Now let’s see how you did.
Several entries mentioned the crossword editor for The New York Times. There were the best two:
- “Will Shortz and I got really drunk last week.”
- “I lost a bet with Will Shortz.”
This week’s contest inspired an unusually high number of entries that took an ordinary phrase and gave it a different and fitting meaning within the context of the cartoon:
- “I’m not that hard to figure out.”
- “I’m looking for someone to complete me.”
- “Fill me in.”
- “When I was your age, I had all the answers.”
- “I have to get something off my chest.”
- “I’m puzzled.”
- “I haven’t a clue.”
- “I’m clueless.”
- “I’ll leave it to you fill in the blanks.”
- “I’m always searching for the right word.”
- “I have skin in the game.”
Here’s the week’s best sex joke: “It gives the wife something to do while waiting for the Viagra to kick in.”
Here are two puns, both of which allude to The New York Times crossword puzzle. As noted by the first entry (a reference to an old Commodores hit), this puzzle gets progressively harder as the week goes on:
- “I’m easy like Monday morning.”
- “It seemed like a good idea at the Times.”
And here’s a pun that refers to the kind of tattoo you’d never want to see on an older man: “It’s a gramp stamp.”
Like I did, several of you noted that tattoos, as well as crossword answers written in ink, are permanent:
- “I asked him to not do the puzzle in ink.”
- “I always do crossword puzzles in ink.”
- “Always use a pencil.”
These entries explain why the older man got his tattoo:
- “In my 20s, I was really into crosswords . . .”
- “You got one, so I got one.”
- “Women can’t resist a challenge!”
That last entry does not need an exclamation point.
Like I did, many of you noticed that the crossword puzzle is missing the all-important clues, and guessed that they might be tattooed somewhere private:
- “Care to guess where the clues are?”
- “Guess where the clues are.”
- “Don’t ask where the clues are.”
- “Trust me, you don’t want to see the clues.”
- “You don’t want to know where the clues are.”
This caption suggests that the older man’s tattoo is the daily crossword: “The tricky part is getting it updated daily.”
And this entry assumes that the younger man’s tattoo is a tribal armband: “You have your tribe, I have mine.”
This week’s winner: “I have skin in the game.”
ENTER THIS WEEK’S CAPTION CONTEST
Lawrence Wood has won The New Yorker’s Cartoon Caption Contest a record-setting seven times and been a finalist two other times. He has collaborated with New Yorker cartoonists Peter Kuper, Lila Ash, Felipe Galindo Gomez, and Harry Bliss (until Bliss tossed him aside, as anyone would, to collaborate with Steve Martin). Nine of his collaborations have appeared in The New Yorker, and one is included in the New Yorker Encyclopedia of Cartoons.