#New yorker cartoons with captions professional

“What a misunderstanding!” This one is subtle. I think what I like most about this caption is that it’s what I would say if I were to fly into a New Yorker cartoon. And yet, “Christ, what an asshole!” is a sentiment totally consistent with another type of New Yorker - the dgaf type that broadcasts their opinions to everyone on the street and has somewhere to go ASAP. The humor comes from the incongruity of the characters’ dispassionate reaction in the face of whatever absurdity is happening in the room. Often, these panels sort of play with the urbane yet uptight bearing of a certain type of bourgeois New Yorker. “Christ, what an asshole!” I love how this one subverts the tone of your typical New Yorker cartoon. I know explaining these lines gets into territory painfully close to one of those Saturday Night Live prime-time specials where Lorne Michaels explains why each skit is funny, thus rendering it entirely unfunny, but still: What I appreciate about the four previously-recognized universal captions is that each works in a slightly different way. Better yet, consider the conversational usage of “guy” to signify any living or inanimate being in existence. Please consider “guy” in this case to be a gender neutral term. For the record, I’ve been testing “Almost positive you’re in the wrong panel, my guy” for two years. Old news to my Insta followers, some of whom demand I compile all of my submissions ( which I’ll do, sooner rather than later which I did in November 2021 - I’ll continue updating the collection over time). I’ve been submitting to the caption contest on and off since 2016, and in 2019 I unlocked a fifth universal New Yorker caption: “Almost positive you’re in the wrong panel, my guy.” What are you gonna do, argue that any of these can’t serve the purpose every New Yorker caption is supposed to serve? Popular sentiment is right.

#New yorker cartoons with captions professional

Cory Arcangel unlocked “ What a misunderstanding!” in 2011, and Frank Chimero has unlocked two: “ Everyone was apparently very bored at work that day” (2015) and “ Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn” (2016). Up to now-ish, we as a society have also accepted four New Yorker captions as “universal.” The first was unlocked by Chris Lavoie, back in 2006: “ Christ, what an asshole!” The pace of discovery really ramped up within the last decade.

I’d be willing to wager the dream of discovering a new universal New Yorker caption is kicking around somewhere in the brain-pan of anyone who frequently submits to the magazine’s weekly Caption Contest. As a society, we’ve accepted there is such a thing as a universal New Yorker cartoon caption - a gag line that can work with any New Yorker cartoon.