Winning the New Yorker cartoon caption contest was pretty easy for me, but then again, I’m something of a genius. Maybe not an “IQ genius,” like some other thinner, bookish people, but all the same, I have my own sparkle. My mother assured me that, ever since that bee stung me in Niagara Falls on my 24th birthday, I’ve had a special quality about me, something almost luminous. “There was a touch of the divine in that bee poison,” she said, “you’ll always be a ‘petit cerveau’ to me.”
You probably want to know an awful lot more about me, about my journey from bee sting to crafting the perfect cartoon quip, but I don’t want to bore you with the details of how I struggled academically, professionally, athletically and romantically before rising to the top in one electric flash, when I, Michael Murray, won the New Yorker cartoon caption contest.
Let’s just concentrate on the victory so that I might be able to inspire you to similar heights, for truly, in our hearts, is the New Yorker not the summit to which all our hopes ascend?
My caption was for a cartoon that had two grizzled cowboys riding through a desert. One of the cowboys was on a horse, the other a giant insect. The cowboy on the insect appeared to be speaking to the other guy in a nonchalant way. I looked at it and thought, “On a clear day, I can get Santa Fe on the antenna.”
