People more liberal, people who like more avant-garde art—they will tend to like cartoons that have…less resolution, less closure.
The New Yorker’s cartoon editor Robert Mankoff created the precursor to the magazine’s weekly caption contest in 1998. Over the course of the 185 contests since, he has received more than a million entries. Built on his extensive caption library, he traces the intersection of individual experience and cultural climate in the creatopm pf a common comic landscape. He also offers a peek behind the scenes: what his colleague Farley Katz does at work, letters from writers of rejected captions, and insights into the history of the magazine's cartoons.
Presented in partnership with the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan.