A treat today for aspiring writers, poets, and Cartoon Caption Contest contestants—a guest post by the writer, poet, and past winner of the New Yorker Caption Contest Cody Walker.

Cody teaches courses in writing, literature, and comic theory at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He’s the author of the poetry collection “Shuffle and Breakdown” and the co-editor of “Alive at the Center: An Anthology of Poems from the Pacific Northwest.” After many years of trying, he won the Caption Contest, in 2010, with this entry:

He also wrote an essay about the trials and tribulations of being fixated on the contest, and how, once he became a finalist, his obsession went from “something that occupied maybe ten minutes of a typical Sunday to something that haunts my days and chills my dreaming nights.” Uh, did I mention that Cody’s a poet? Anyway, the trials and tribulations did eventually result in triumph, which I assume ended the haunting and the chilling.

For me, the most interesting part of the essay was Cody’s use of the Caption Contest in his writing courses. Cody’s winning caption is an excellent example of not only a good joke but also a good sentence. His idea was not unique; there were other captions with the same basic concept:> “Well, the treatment is seventeen light-years away, but that’s what you get for having universal health care.”

“The good news is that I have a cure for what ails you, the bad news is that it’s ten thousand light-years away.”

But these entries, nevertheless, are… light-years away from Cody’s concise setup and punch line.

Anyway, I thought Cody might have more to say about the intersection of good caption writing and writing in general, so I’ve asked him to say more.

Take it away, Cody.

Around eight years ago, when I was teaching a writing course at the University of Washington, I made a change to my syllabus: students would be required to read each week’s

New Yorker, cover to cover. We pored through the letters, the Profiles, the television reviews. No Critic’s Notebook went unnoted, no shout (or murmur) unheard. I asked everyone to bring in several sentences (a John McPhee scale-balancer, a Hilton Als dart) that they wished they had written themselves. All of this reading and highlighting (along with the discussion that followed) proved useful: my students’ writing soon displayed more of the “snap, go, fling” that Whitman praised (he was talking about baseball, but it applies to essay writing as well). But the most important addition to the class was the request that the students try their hand at the cartoon-caption contest—a seemingly fun assignment, but one with serious consequences. As I’ve now preached to countless students (first in Seattle and, more recently, in Ann Arbor), working on captions will make you a better writer.

Inexperienced writers sometimes imagine that good writing comes from good ideas. But that’s not right: good writing comes from good sentences. It comes from caring about sentence construction: the rhythm of the clauses, the placement of the predicate. And working on captions—fiddling with punctuation and modifiers—reinforces this lesson wonderfully. Any sentence that aspires to artfulness—that is, any sentence that you might want to read out loud or share with a friend—makes a kind of gesture (and, in this way, distinguishes itself from the dead-on-arrival sentences often found in textbooks and, I’m sorry to say, student essays). The sentence may raise its (figurative) arms; it may shrug; it may snarl. Whatever the case, it captures an attitude—and it does so efficiently and memorably. Just as good captions do.

Running an in-house (or, rather, in-classroom) Caption Contest at the end of each week provided us with the perfect laboratory in which to discuss these all-important issues of pacing, music, and weight. Plus, we had prizes! After submitting their entries, the students voted for the best of the bunch; then a pair of students tallied the class votes and gave a gift to the winner: a Sonics bobblehead doll, maybe, or twenty dollars’ worth of coffee. Many of the entries struck me as brilliant—though none actually made it into the magazine’s finalists’ circle. (I encouraged the students to submit to the New Yorker contest—and, when they didn’t place in the top three, I told them, “You finished fourth! Fourth is good! Out of five thousand weekly entries: fourth!”) Occasionally, someone’s entry matched the entry of one of the magazine’s finalists, which resulted in the student learning a hard but useful truth:

I also participated in the class contest, but my syllabus disclaimer—“You’re ineligible to collect the prize if you’re absent, if you vote for yourself, or if you have a Ph.D. in comic theory”—proved largely unnecessary. When I finally did win the in-class version of the contest, I let out a “Yes!” that my students reacted to with a mix of surprise and pity. The following semester, I won the in-class contest during the first week and thought, O.K., order restored—maybe I’ll run the table. The weeks wore on; I never won again.

As I’ve continued to use the Caption Contest as a teaching tool, I’ve marked the many ways in which my students’ sentences have improved in the course of each semester. Gone are those too-fancy words that scream “thesaurus”; gone are those unnecessary modifiers. (We consider carefully Mark Twain’s half-serious advice: “When you catch an adjective, kill it.”) Students allow themselves to be bold, to be bracing—to sharpen their font edges. The old Will Rogers line—“Everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody else”—liberates them.

Though I’ve called on the Caption Contest most often in my creative-nonfiction classes, I’ve also sprung it on my fiction and poetry students. In my fiction workshop, we begin with stories as short as a single sentence—from Hemingway’s famous downer (which he may not have written): “For sale: baby shoes, never worn,” to Amy Hempel’s magnificent “Housewife”: “She would always sleep with her husband and with another man in the course of the same day, and then the rest of the day, for whatever was left to her of that day, she would exploit by incanting, ‘French film, French film.’ ” The Caption Contest forces students to weigh the value of each word and to consider where the stresses should best fall (Hempel ends her short-short with a double-trochee hammer-blow).

In his essay “Bottom’s Dream: The Likeness of Poems and Jokes,” Howard Nemerov notes that poetry and jokes both find “fault in this world’s smooth façade,” and they do so with an “economy of materials,” a “sudden reversal of the relations of the elements,” and “an apparent absurdity [which], introduced into the context of the former sense, makes a new and deeper sense.” My poetry students and I often wind up talking about the structural similarities between poems and jokes—and here the study of captions again proves useful. Consider the following poems, quoted here in their entirety:

“The Party” Invite Don Rickles.

(By Loren Goodman, from “Famous Americans.” )

“Twenty Questions, the Advanced Edition” “Is it retromingent?”

(By Jason Whitmarsh, from “Tomorrow’s Living Room.”)

Goodman and Whitmarsh each explore the poem-joke nexus, and in doing so they meet Ezra Pound’s challenge to “keep the language efficient.” They also traffic in what Freud, in his book on jokes, calls “bewilderment and illumination”—that state of being pleasantly perplexed until the light bulb switches on. At first, one might ask, “Are these even poems?” But the answer quickly becomes clear. The world of capital-P Poetry itself has a too-smooth façade; these poems crack it. Each poem uses great “economy of materials”: three words. But sometimes three words are all a poem or a caption needs.

A clue that a guest blog post is nearing its end: the writer sends in the funny-sad clowns. I’ll close with my favorite winning caption from the history of the Caption Contest, Jacqueline Tager’s entry from contest No. 10:

The whole history of a relationship pulses in those nine short words. And the gesture is unmistakable: the hesitation at the start (marked by the “well” and the two pauses), followed by the light music of the three “m” words and the devastating final you-asked-for-it wallop. Isn’t this the meanest thing you could possibly say to a clown? I’ve treasured Tager’s triumph for eight years. Write like this, I tell my students. Write like this.

Thanks, Cody. Very well-written, as befits a writer, poet, and, of course, winner of the Caption Contest.