This month’s contest featured a cartoon by Robert Leighton, whose work and insights appear throughout my upcoming book, “Your Caption Has Been Selected—More than anyone could possibly want to know about The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest,” which will be published on June 4, 2024. (I decided to change things up this month by opening instead of ending with a plug for my book, which you can pre-order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250333407.)
Leighton’s drawing is set in a hospital waiting room, where a trio of surgeons is delivering some news to Dorothy Gale, the protagonist in “The Wizard of Oz.” From the doctors’ expressions, the news isn’t good. Leighton’s original caption suggested that Dorothy’s misguided attempt to help The Tin Man killed him: “Well, we put in a heart like you insisted, and now he’s dead.” I love that line.
One of you noted another possible and unintended side-effect to the operation: “We gave The Tin Man a heart and now he’s proposed to the MRI machine.”
There have been several screen adaptations of Frank Baum’s books about Oz, but the most famous is the 1939 musical, which may have set the record for the most memorable lines. Many of you submitted entries that were inspired by one of these lines, but the success of each entry depended on how well it alluded to the hospital setting. I’ve organized the best of the “movie quote” entries by the lines to which they refer:
Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.
- “Let’s just say Auntie Em is not in Kansas anymore.”
- “I don’t think you’re in network anymore.”
- “Sorry, you’re not in Kaiser anymore.”
I like the reference to “Kaiser Permanente,” a huge managed care consortium based in California, because Kaiser is a clever substitute for Kansas. But one of my fellow-judges, Joel Mishon, is from England, and he pointed out that no one outside America would get the joke.
We’re off to see the wizard.
- “We’re off to meet your deductible.”
- “We’re off to see the coroner.”
- “He’s off to see St. Peter.”
The last two captions are making the same dark joke—the patient died on the table—but I can’t decide which one I like best. The “coroner” line has a great deadpan tone, but the “St. Peter” entry scans beautifully and has the exact same rhythm as the line from the movie.
Lion and tigers and bears! Oh my!
“Lesions and tumors and burns! Oh my!”
I love the way that entry matches not only the rhythm of the line from the movie but the first letter of each word in that line.
If I only had a brain.
“If he only had better insurance.”
There’s no place like home.
- “Do you need help getting home, Dorothy?”
- “You’ll be going home alone.”
A few entries tried to work in a reference to the same line by making HMO or home care or homeopathy jokes, but they were all too clunky.
Several of you suggested that the doctors were operating on the witch:
- “We’re trying to find someone to get the house off her.”
- “There’s nothing we could do. A house fell on her.”
- “We were able to save the house.”
- “I’m very sorry. She’s alive.”
Mankoff did not like any of those captions because he didn’t think Dorothy would be concerned about the witch, but I think the fourth entry addresses that concern.
Here’s the best anesthesia joke: “It took a whole field of poppies to sedate him.”
And here’s the best flying monkeys joke: “It’s possible their monkeypox was airborne.”
A couple of you focused on the fact that The Tin Man needed a heart and the Scarecrow needed a brain:
- “On the bright side, he was able to donate all the other major organs.”
- “Are you an organ donor?”
- “We’d really like to speak with his previous cardiologist.”
This entry highlights the fact that the 1939 movie is a musical: “There’s no easy way to say this, so we’ll have to sing and dance.”
Finally, here’s an entry that has the surgeon trying to make the best of a bad situation: “We couldn’t save The Tin Man, but we do recycle.”
Congratulations to VINCENT COCA, a co-host of The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest podcast, who submitted the winning entry: “You’ll be going home alone.”
The runners up are:
- “I don’t think you’re in network anymore.”
- “There’s no easy way to say this, so we’ll have to sing and dance.”
- “We’d really like to speak with his previous cardiologist.”
- “We’re off to see the coroner.”
- “He’s off to see St. Peter.”
For those of you who want to see how we made our selections, we recorded the process and posted it here.