How to Come Up With a Caption Contest Cartoon

I’ve accomplished a lot of cartooning goals in the last couple years: cartoons in the New Yorker, cartoons for the Daily, multiple other publications. But now I’m setting my sights on some new goals, one of which is that I’d love to have a cartoon in the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest.

The current New Yorker contest

I decided to submit a batch of captionless cartoons specifically for the contest. My impression is that usually the cartoons they pick for the contest are ones that were submitted as captioned cartoons in peoples’ regular, weekly batches. If the editors think one might work well for the caption contest, they’ll drop the caption and use it for the contest. But I’ve also heard a few cartoonists say they have submitted drawings specifically for the contest and had them chosen that way. So I figured, why not give it a try?

I decided to work up a batch of 10 captionless drawings specifically for the contest. It’s kind of a lot to take on in addition to what I’m already trying to do: drawing at least one cartoon a day, submitting a batch of 10 a week, staying on top of Patreon, Substack, social media, etc. It’s been a little challenging finding the time to fit them in but I have been shooting for doing one caption contest cartoon a week. Once I get ten I’m happy with I’ll submit them as a batch. I figure even if they don’t pick any for the contest, I can still find other uses for them. I could try to just caption them myself and submit them again. I could see if CartoonStock would be interested in one for their caption contest. Maybe I could have my own caption contest on Patreon or Instagram. Maybe I could make an assignment for my students to try to caption them. I’ll find a use for them one way or another.

The current CartoonStock contest

So the first thing I did was I looked back at the last 50 or so caption contests to see what had already been done recently. I wanted to come up with subjects for my drawings that would be unique, nothing that had been done in at least the last year or so of contests. A big complaint I hear on the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest Podcast is when a certain subject gets used too often in too many contests. Cats, dogs, sheep, these and others are apparently all overdone. It makes sense, if you play the contest and come up with a bunch of ideas around a certain subject, like a dog for example, then you’re going to probably just be repeating a lot of the same ideas if there is another dog contest. That’s not fun. So I went through and I wrote down all of the subjects in all of the cartoons from the last 50 or so contests. That gave me a list of subjects to avoid.

If you haven’t listened to this podcast you should.

Here is my list of subjects to avoid: