Introduction

The New Yorker Caption Contest is well-known, and it is also well-known that it is rarely any good. In fact, it is so bad that a generic phrase like “Go fuck yourself”  often works better than any of the actual contestants (someone once posted a series of cartoons with that caption here but the website has apparently expired.)

Your goal is to come up with one phrase that can work for three cartoons at once. Every third week, I’ll post the three cartoons on the back page of the New Yorker, and one example for a generic caption to beat. I think “There goes the neighborhood” works pretty well for all of these:

“There goes the neighborhood”

“There goes the neighborhood”

“There goes the neighborhood”

Each time there’s a fresh set,  I’ll post those and pick the winners from the last set. Defending champions will automatically be re-entered in next week’s contest.

So, the above cartoons (from the March 7 issue) are the ones for the first contest. Can you beat “there goes the neighborhood?” It doesn’t have to be in that style, it can be something brilliant that reconceptualizes the way we reconceptualize the cartoon contest. It can be something that would genuinely work as an entry to the New Yorker contest. Or it can be something so utterly inane that it is better than anything else.

Leave your entries in the comments (max three per person per contest) along with your name.

 

UPDATE: The entries are in! Vote now: