9/24/2023 0 Comments New yorker captionsOne winner, John Brouwer told me, “The caption came slowly. They think hard about the cartoon, and they keep trying new ideas and work on improving their first ideas. And the same goes for the cartoon caption contest: caption winners almost never have their ideas instantly. The “sudden flash of insight” is largely a myth. The first important discovery about creativity is that ideas emerge over time, from hard work and constant revision. I found that there’s a pattern to their creativity-and this pattern provides a window onto how all creativity works for scientists and inventors and for The New Yorker caption contest as well. I’m a psychologist who studies what goes on in the mind when you’re being creative. But that’s not the way it usually happens-not with cartoon captions, and not with scientific or artistic breakthroughs, either. You stare at the cartoon for a while, stumped, until a caption suddenly jumps up from your unconscious mind like Newton getting bonked by an apple and thinking up gravity. Maybe it’s like this-the proverbial light bulb moment. How do you win the New Yorker cartoon caption contest? Even if you never plan to enter the contest, taking the question seriously may help answer a bigger question: where do good ideas come from? Here’s a short article I wrote after interviewing a few recent winners of the contest, after being introduced to them by cartoon editor Bob Mankoff. The funniest caption is selected by a panel of judges and published two weeks later. For the last few years, the magazine has gotten readers involved in the art of cartoon humor: it publishes a one-frame cartoon, without a caption, and invites readers to come up with funny captions and submit them. Since it was founded in the 1920s, the New Yorker magazine has been famous for its one-frame black and white cartoons, each with a single one-line caption published underneath.
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