The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest is certainly the most famous and popular of the current You-Write-the-Gag exercises. So popular it has birthed a book, a game, and winners become news stories for their local newspapers.
Cartoon Collections runs the similar idea. So similar it uses New Yorker cartoonists to supply the drawings. This is a natural evolution since Bob Mankoff who runs Cartoon Collections was The New Yorker cartoon editor when the The New Yorker contest began.
The popularity of these brain games has spread far and wide.
These days a number of editorial cartoonists create comic art for their newspapers asking readers to write funny lines with the best of them being published.
Steve Breen at the San Diego Union-Tribune has been at it for quite a while.
He has even syndicated the idea.
Elsewhere a couple other old editorial hands are doing it for their newspapers.
Walt Handelsman and Phil Hands.
Steve Breen’s Caption It! was popular enough for Creators to double down on the game.
Gary Varvel‘s Humor Me has a twist – local editors pick the winner and is more political.
Having never had one of my cartoons chosen for the contest until this week, I had no idea how massive it still was: I’m getting messages and emails from every language on earth!