Jeremy Nguyen’s cartoon is set in a library, where cadavers—their bodies covered with sheets, their left toes tagged—are stretched out on every available surface. Two librarians, one male and one female, are looking at a cadaver that’s on a bookcase in front of a “new arrivals” sign. The female librarian is speaking.
Because corpses need cold environments, I thought the librarian might be instructing her colleague to lower the temperature: “Turn down the thermostat.”
With the rise of digital media, are books and newspapers a thing of the past? I hope not, but that possibility led to my next caption: “Print is dead, too.”
My next two captions were inspired by librarians who constantly remind patrons to lower their voices:
- “We won’t have to shush them”
- “At least they’re quiet.”
I then imagined the librarians trying to decide which section the cadavers belong in: “I don’t know whether to put them in horror or true crime.”
Finally, I focused on the “new arrivals” sign: “They’re actually the new dead-on-arrivals.”
Now let’s see how you did:
There were a shockingly high number of good puns (a record-setting fourteen).
Several turned on a common expression’s double meaning:
- “I think they’re already checked out.”
- “Sorry, they’re checked out.”
- “Our check out system needs to be revised.”
- “If they’re checked out, why are they still here?”
Others turned on the double meaning of a single word:
- “Brand new and it already has a broken spine.”
- “I always end up cracking their spine.”
- “The spine should be facing out.”
Two focused on the sign in front of one of the cadavers:
- “Let’s change the sign to new dead on arrivals.”
- “Redo the sign. These are new departures.”
I like this reference to an Edward Albee classic: “Be very afraid of Virginia Woolf.”
It’s been forty years since “Queen” released the second biggest hit of their career, which served as the inspiration for this pun: “Another one bites the dust jacket.”
Two entrants submitted this reference to a library classification system: “We use the Dewey Decimate System.”
If you take a common expression for making anatomical bequests and add a one-word literary reference at the end, you get one of this week’s strongest puns: “They donated their bodies to science fiction.”
I’ll conclude this unusually long section on puns with a caption that identifies the cadavers: “This is our dead poets’ section.”
Many of you thought the cadavers belonged in a different section:
- “Move them to Mystery/Suspense.”
- “Let’s move them to the Mystery section.”
- “They belong in Mysteries.”
- “These get shelved under Mystery.”
- “Put them with the autobiographies. No one goes there.”
I like the way that last caption has the librarians trying to hide the bodies, but it doesn’t quite work because autobiographies and memoirs are, I believe, quite popular.
This presumes the librarian is responsible for the dead bodies: “I don’t make the overdue policies. I just enforce them.”
Like I did, many of you focused on the fact that librarians like silence:
- “Now it’s quiet.”
- “At least they went quietly.”
- “Now it’s a little too quiet in here.”
- “If this wasn’t a library, I’d scream.”
- “Yes, very quiet…but they’re still disturbing the other patrons.”
- “There’s no need to shush these guys.”
- “At least we don’t have to shush them.”
- “Hey, at least they’re quiet.”
That last caption is very similar to one of mine, but it includes an unnecessary first word, which is why I prefer the shorter entry that’s identical to mine: “At least they’re quiet.” Unfortunately, I don’t think I can choose a caption that’s identical to one of mine as the winner. It wouldn’t seem right.
Here are two captions that are similar to but actually better than two of mine:
- “Does it seem cold in here to you?”
- “You know what else is dead? Print.”
A captionless cartoon that features dead bodies will inevitably elicit suicide jokes, which run the risk of being distasteful or even cruel. But they can also be funny, like these two entries:
- “I guess the self-help section didn’t really help.”
- “Maybe we should start a Beyond Help section.”
If you think those captions are in bad taste, you’re really not going to like this: “The children’s section is even more upsetting.” That’s a good, sick joke. The only problem is that the librarians appear to already be in the children’s section, as the one legible book title is “Thomas the Train.”
I’m highlighting this next entry, which I really like, in honor of my former boss, Diana White, a voracious reader who was not intimidated by great literature—she received her Ph.D. in Classics and Classical Literature from the University of Chicago—but who once told me that she would “go to [her] grave never having read Proust.” Diana, this caption’s for you: “They died trying to finish Remembrance of Things Past.”
Many academics and students complain that the English literary canon focuses too much or even exclusively on dead, white male authors. This entry recognizes that complaint: “Admittedly, our selection consists of a lot of dead white males.”
This caption approaches the problem of dead writers from a less political angle: “I keep telling them we need to feature more living authors.”
I like the way these entries note that libraries function as educational centers:
- “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”
- “The dead have so much to teach us.”
As (almost) always, I will conclude with several strong captions that don’t fit neatly into any category:
- “Everybody loves a good Mystery.”
- “I was told to put them in the stacks.”
- “Apparently I’m also now the coroner.”
- “I still can’t figure out how they got them through the book return slot.”
- “These aren’t going to re-shelve themselves.”
I don’t know that I’ve ever before highlighted that many entries—nearly 5% of the number submitted. Choosing a winner is, as always, a difficult task, but I’m going with, “Maybe we should start a Beyond Help section.”
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.