In Kendra Allenby’s cartoon, two women are in a living room, looking at a bearded man who’s seated at a table and reading the paper while surrounded by many bags of trash. Seagulls are circling and perching on these bags. The woman on the left is speaking.
I first thought that the man was ignoring his only household responsibility: “He has one chore. One.”
I then thought about Dan Savage, the sometimes brutally direct advice columnist who often receives letters from people complaining about their partners. When the problem cannot be addressed through counseling, Dan’s advice is always DTMFA (Dump The Mother-Fucker Already; his words, not mine). That advice inspired my first caption: “We’re past therapy.”
Even Dan Savage, however, acknowledges that it’s hard to leave someone with whom you have an especially strong physical connection, and that led to my next caption: “He’s really good in bed.”
I then thought of a couple of pandemic-related jokes:
- “I have no problem maintaining a distance of at least six feet.”
- “The sanitation department lets him work from home.”
The virus has forced many people to cancel vacation plans, so I imagined that the man might be trying to attract seagulls in a misguided attempt to replicate the feeling of being near the ocean: “He says if you close your eyes it’s like being at the shore.”
Now let’s see how you did:
I feared that Allenby’s drawing would elicit a lot of references to Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and I was right, but I was pleasantly surprised by one unexpectedly clever pun: “These are Jonathan’s living room seagulls.”
I also like these two puns, which have nothing to do with JLS:
- “He’s a trash collector.”
- “He’s a keeper, they said.”
That second caption would be so much stronger without the last two words. They’re unnecessary, and the caption should end with the punchline, which is “keeper.”
Most of this week’s pandemic-related entries were about social distancing:
- “His new method of social distancing.”
- “Social distancing is the one thing he’s good at.”
- “It’s his idea of social distancing.”
- “That’s one way to social distance.”
The others were about working remotely:
- “The Sanitation Department has him bringing his work home.”
- “Even garbage men were told they had to work from home.”
- “Streets and Sanitation workers should not be allowed to work from home.”
- “Yeah, the Sanitation Department is having them all work from home.”
That fourth caption would be the best of the “working remotely” entries if it were just a little tighter. Every word counts in a caption, and the words “yeah” and “all” just get in the way and do nothing but make the caption longer.
A couple of similar entries allude not to working from home but to bringing work home:
- “I hate it when he brings his work home with him.”
- “Most sanitation workers don’t bring their work home.”
This caption—“He’s great in bed!”—is almost identical to one of mine, but I wish it didn’t include an exclamation point. The woman who’s speaking isn’t excited, so the punctuation doesn’t match her expression. She’s explaining why she’s staying with her trash-collecting partner, but she doesn’t look proud or defiant. She looks resigned, so the caption should end with a less emphatic period.
This next entry offers another and far less believable explanation for the woman’s decision to stay with such a difficult partner: “But he writes the best captions.” I’m usually not much for meta-humor, but I do like that caption. And as someone who’s lost more than 700 New Yorker caption contests (and who’s named Larry), I can also relate to this entry: “I just can’t get Larry to part with any of his losing captions.” Here’s another entry I like that assumes the man in the drawing and I share the same first name: “Thanks for putting pants on today, Larry.”
Here’s the week’s best sex joke: “So, Amy, are you still down for that threesome?”
And here is an entry I could never choose as this week’s winner even though it made me laugh out loud: “Take a last look at your son, Mildred, before I castrate him and feed his balls to the seagulls.” Vulgar? Yes. Disturbing? Sure. But it fits the drawing and all three characters’ expressions perfectly, and though it’s unusually long I wouldn’t change a word. Each one serves a purpose.
This common expression works perfectly well in the context of the drawing—“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure”—but I prefer this subtler variation on the same joke: “Remember, it’s another man’s treasure.”
Here’s a variation on another common saying, one that’s used in computer science to express the idea that flawed data produces useless results: “We’re good on garbage in. Garbage out is a struggle.”
And here’s a clever twist on an English proverb: “But you can’t take the landfill away from the man.” This entry makes a similar point, but without alluding to any proverbs: “He misses his job at the landfill.”
I like this caption—“At least I got him to bag the trash this month”—but why does it end with the words “this month?” That’s not the punchline. The punchline is “bag the trash,” and the caption should end with those words. Here’s a better variation on the same joke: “I finally got him to put his trash in bags.”
Here’s a reference to Marie Kondo: “He says he can’t toss it because it sparks joy.”
Here’s a superior version of one of my captions: “It doesn’t remind me of being at the beach.”
And here’s a good lawyer joke: “My divorce lawyer says I’ll probably get half.”
These next three captions allude to the woman’s dissatisfaction with the state of her relationship with the trash collector:
- “This might be the last straw for me.”
- “Apparently, I’m the only thing he can do without.”
- “He never takes me out, either.”
While this entry makes the woman seem less critical: “He’s doing his best to reduce the landfills.”
These captions have the woman ignoring the most evident and pressing problem and complaining about a much less significant issue:
- “The beard is beginning to bother me.”
- “The beard has to go.”
- “What are you staring at?”
And this entry presumes that the woman and the man deserve each other because they’re equally stubborn: “It’s his turn to take the trash out.”
This entry, which I love, is unique because it assumes that the woman who’s speaking is commenting not on her relationship with the trash collector, but on the other woman’s relationship with him: “Well, you do have a type.”
I had a hard time choosing a winner this week—there were a lot of strong contenders—but I’m going with, “I finally got him to put his trash in bags.”
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.