It may not be clear to people how important captions are to a cartoon—unless of course the idea is simply visual and no caption. For my work, I often write the caption repeatedly, change words, reorder words, listen to them to make sure they sound right, play with the structure. So I thought it might be fun to hear all the captions from this week’s New Yorker, and I read them here, without practicing. I skipped the ones that were captionless, of course, or ones that were captioned within the drawing.
Ideally, the caption and art dance together seemlessly, so this is an odd thing to do. It might even make for some kind of poetry.
Enjoy!
Listening To Captions