Sometime you have to let art flow over you. But apparently, this is not one of those times. How To Win the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest

Should you make a pun or, perhaps, create a visual gag about a cat surreptitiously reading its owner’s e-mail? Neither. You must aim for what is called a “theory of mind” caption, which requires the reader to project intents or beliefs into the minds of the cartoon’s characters.

I’ve entered this exactly once. To me, caption contests are backwards. I have an idea and draw a situation to match — the trick is distilling an allegedly funny idea into something that I can draw in a single-panel cartoon.

The “theory of mind” approach lets you take a single point in time — the utterance of the whatever’s in the caption — and force the reader to construct what has just happened (and sometimes the drawing does that anyway), but that and the common experience the reader must have is as much of a setup as you get. I’ve had people tell me a joke and suggest that it would make a funny cartoon, and I have to point out it took 45 seconds of talking to set up the punchline. It’s rare that that will lend itself to a single-panel cartoon.

via Cosmic Variance