"Guess who's getting voted off the island."
With those few words, Associate Professor of History Michael Vorenberg won the New Yorker's 172nd weekly Cartoon Caption Contest. The week's cartoon depicted a strange-looking smiley face situated among the iconic Moai statues of Chile's Easter Island. Vorenberg's winning caption beat about 5,000 competitors, according to Robert Mankoff, the magazine's cartoon editor.
Mankoff said that contest entries "tend to fall into categories" and that this time, many readers' submissions fell under the "voted off the island" theme. Occasionally, he said, winning entries are exactly the same and the winner is chosen at random.
Reached by telephone, Vorenberg declined to comment on his winning entry.
The contest, which first landed on the magazine's back page in 2005, began as a "general participatory push," Mankoff said.
"The most common thing that people say is: 'I can't draw, but...,'" he said.
Though the competition does not offer a monetary rewardto winners, the thrill of seeing one's name in print seems to be prize enough. Many contestants submit regularly, Mankoff said, and one person has even won three times.
Vorenberg, he said, has submitted three captions to the magazine altogether, though he hit the magic formula only once. "His first two were terrible," Mankoff said, laughing.
