Cracking the Code of The New Yorker?s Cartoon Caption Contest

Researchers analyzed submissions to The New Yorker's Cartoon Caption Contest No. 281, won by film critic Roger Ebert. Image courtesy The New Yorker

If you want to win The New Yorker?s Cartoon Caption Contest, you?d do well to mind these four factors: novelty, length, punctuation, and ?abstractness and imaginability.?

Paying attention to those parameters certainly doesn?t guarantee a win in the weekly competition, which calls on readers to craft their own punch lines to accompany black-and-white drawings. But it will increase your winning potential, according to a professor who analyzed the captions submitted for a recent round.

McGraw, a professor of marketing and psychology at University of Colorado Boulder, was looking to see if patterns emerged that might reveal what factors are present in submissions shortlisted by New Yorker editors.

?I have to admit I was worried we wouldn?t find anything,? McGraw said of his research into contest No. 281. ?The Cartoon Caption Contest seems to be a mystery in some ways. There was this tension between, ?Will we find something? Or will we just fall flat and have nothing to report?? I have to say that I didn?t have strong expectations.?

The jokes submitted to the The New Yorker?s Cartoon Caption Contest possess a humor all their own. They?re an interesting mix of social commentary, wry New York sensibilities and deadpan punch, among other things. It?s notoriously frustrating trying to write a top submission ? just ask famed film critic Roger Ebert, who tried more than 100 times before finally winning the contest last month.

Presumably Ebert, a funny man in his own right, should?ve been well-versed enough in novelty, brevity, punctuation and imagination to come up with a winning caption with little effort. Yet he submitted captions 107 times over the years before winning contest No. 281.

McGraw, who was featured in this month?s Wired magazine for his theory on why things are funny, worked with Phil Fernbach, a cognitive scientist from Brown University, on the study of what makes a New Yorker cartoon caption successful.

The results of the study weren?t shocking, said Robert Mankoff, The New Yorker?s cartoon editor.

?I can say with certainty that we shouldn?t compromise our research ethics by generalizing the results beyond this particular caption contest to all the other 283 contests, or, for that matter, to non-caption-contest New Yorker cartoons, or to humor in general,? Mankoff said in his response on McGraw?s blog post about the caption contest findings. ?That would be a grave mistake which would only be justified if we could make a lot of money out of it.?

So how did McGraw et al come to their conclusions? First, they had to figure out what data they could glean from the captions.

?Basically, we have these 5,000 captions, information about whether they made the shortlist or not and whether or not they were finalists, but that?s about all we had,? Fernbach said. ?So the question is (A) ?What can you get out of that?? and (B) ?If you think that you can?t get that much out of it, you have to go and collect some additional data.??

Fernbach considered using machine-learning techniques to find some meaning in the words, but because the captions were so short, the algorithms, which typically analyze pages of text, didn?t offer much information.

He looked at a psycholinguistic database and compared the words in the captions to what they mean psychologically. Basically, this answered questions like ?Is this word imaginable?? or ?Is this word abstract??

Since the available databases didn?t contain values for abstractness or imaginability for all the words, the researchers took the 5,291 captions submitted for the contest and narrowed the pool to 86 ? the 43 captions the New Yorker editors had shortlisted and a randomly selected additional 43 captions.

A research assistant then judged that sample set on imagery (from ?very hard? to ?very easy? to imagine) and abstractness (from ?very concrete? to ?very abstract?), on a scale of one to seven. The researchers then took the database they created, as well as additional information they collected, and conducted statistical and textual analysis.

Captions with uncommon words were more likely to make the shortlist.

From that analysis, the team determined that captions with uncommon words were more likely to make the shortlist. Editors also liked captions that were on average one word shorter than others. Captions with fewer punctuation marks fared better than others, as did captions that were harder to visualize.

Mankoff addressed some of these findings based on his own experience as cartoon editor. Regarding punctuation he noted: ?I generally agree that shouting a joke doesn?t make it any funnier unless it?s to a deaf person,? but added that a well-placed exclamation point has helped captions in the past. He also said that while McGraw?s findings about caption length and novelty are true to a point, there are always exceptions to the rule. (His full response is in McGraw?s blog post.)

McGraw agrees that his findings aren?t absolute. If someone really wants to improve their chances of winning The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest, they?re better off creating a long list of potential captions and then analyzing which ones follow his guidelines, like a stand-up comic trying out new jokes at a comedy club.

The professor is also quick to point out that a lot more research needs to be done.

?My guess is that we have to be a little bit careful about the conclusions we can draw,? McGraw said. ?This is only one contest. As a good scientist I would want to replicate these effects with many different contests.?

Fernbach said that applying their results to generate general insights about humor ?would probably require more theoretically motivated investigations.?

?There might be some people who think that New Yorker&endash;style cartoons are funnier than others,? Fernbach said. ?There are a million different ways you can go.?

That could be the hardest part about trying to crack the code. With New Yorker humor being as peculiar as it is (just ask Seinfeld), finding any sort of steadfast formula that produces winners seems highly unlikely.

McGraw and Fernbach?s findings provide guidance, but aspiring cartoon captioneers will just have to stick to their wits.

Source: http://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/05/new-yorker-cartoon-caption-contest/

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