Wood has a great time here, mixing the bizarre, the jocular, and the wise into a clever package.
An appealing book about a surprisingly difficult task: writing a good cartoon caption.
It is fair to say that the New Yorker caption contest is a genuine cultural phenomenon, attracting thousands of entries every week. Wood, who has won the competition an unmatched eight times (and made it to the final round 15 times), is perfectly situated to examine why a good caption works, as well as explain how the contest operates. The contest is so popular that simply managing the entries, as well as the public vote on a selection of finalists, has become a huge logistical task for the magazine’s editors. There is no prize for the winner, other than bragging rights. In this entertaining book, Wood includes 175 of the best cartoons and captions, aiming to distill the essence of the humor. Some of the captions are droll, some are wryly thoughtful, and some are laugh-out-loud hilarious. Wood believes that it is the limitation of a caption, where everything must fit in one short comment, that is the key to its appeal. He provides a long list of criteria, highlighting the importance of identifying the speaker, telling a story, avoiding vulgarity, connecting to the details of the cartoon, and selecting the best from several options. “If your caption is selected as a finalist,” he writes, “launch an aggressive social media campaign to win the popular vote. Don’t rely solely on email.” Throughout, the author is charmingly eccentric and pleasing. Interestingly, numerous comedians regularly enter the contest but do no better than other people. Wood, for his part, is not professionally humorous; he is a lawyer. Now that’s funny. Bob Mankoff, the former cartoon editor at the New Yorker, provides the foreword.
Wood has a great time here, mixing the bizarre, the jocular, and the wise into a clever package.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781250333407
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.
The Nobel laureate’s singular aesthetics.
Award-winning novelist, essayist, and literary scholar Serpell offers a compelling elucidation of Toni Morrison’s notably challenging fiction, criticism, plays, and poetry. “There are passages in Morrison’s works,” she has found, “that no reader I’ve ever met understands on the first go.” The source of Morrison’s “famed difficulty,” as Serpell sees it, was not “her intersectional identity, her prickly personality, or her contrarian politics,” but rather her complicated and sophisticated understanding of Black aesthetics. Serpell’s subtle textual analysis of 11 novels, “Recitatif”—Morrison’s only published short story—and several essays, plays, and poems is enriched by her prodigious literary background and insights she has gleaned from archival sources: letters, diary entries, notes, and manuscripts. Morrison, she asserts, “refused for her work to be reduced to her race and her gender, or to be forced to fit the expectations foisted upon her as a result.” Tar Baby (1981), Morrison’s fourth novel, seems to Serpell the first time in the writer’s career that she “directly addressed the white/black dichotomy” with characters who “are avatars for race.” Serpell gives extensive attention to “Recitatif,” a story in which “all racial codes” are vanished, yet one in which “racial identity is crucial” to its characters. The story emerges as “a kind of asymmetrical, contrapuntal, alternative dialogue” between its two female protagonists, “between an individual voice and the instruments of the social world, or between the reader’s experience and the story’s unresolved chords—or codes.” Celebrating Morrison’s “masterful difficulty and superb wit,” “her inscrutable yet perfect metaphors,” and “her unaccountable rushes of imagination,” Serpell affords ample evidence that she was “a writer whose deliberate difficulty—personal, political, and literary—defied classification…and made for brilliance.”
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780593732915
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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