Woody Allen Tonight: Part 2 of "Death Knocks" (from "Getting Even")

Tonight Nat Ackerman's drawing and discarding for his life.

NAT: You want to play a tenth of a cent a point to make it interesting?

DEATH: It's not interesting enough for you?

NAT: I play better when money's at stake.

DEATH: Whatever you say, Newt.

NAT: Nat. Nat Ackerman. You don't know my name?

DEATH: Newt, Nat -- I got such a headache.

-- from tonight's installment of "Death Knocks"

Last night, in our Part 1 of "Death Knocks," we met dress manufacturer Nat Ackerman near midnight in the bedroom of his two-story home in Kew Gardens, Queens, so absorbed reading his Daily News (headline: "NAB COEDS IN POT ORGY") that he fails to hear an intruder climbing up his drainpipe with a view toward making a dramatic entrance, which turns instead into a stumbling and gasping entrance. Death ("for it is no one else") lays out the situation for Nat: His time is up. When he insists, "It's the moment," Nat replies, "How can it be the moment? I just merged with Modiste Originals." Eventually Nat persuades Death -- who doesn't play chess but claims to be good at gin rummy -- to play a hand, bargaining for a chance to win a day's respite from his departure. Let the game begin! -- Ken





FOR PART 2 OF "DEATH KNOCKS," CLICK HERE





THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Stranger's Day (August 24) -- an idea whose time has come, courtesy of the great Roz Chast

As if one genius idea wasn't enough, this week's New Yorker features Roz on the Satan Sandwich (see below)



"Stranger’s Day has the potential to be the greatest holiday of all, not least for the greeting-card industry. On all other holidays, you send cards only to those people you know, but the number of people you don’t know is in the billions."

-- New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff,

in his weekly newsletter/blog

by Ken



I was happy to see Bob Mankoff getting behind Stranger's Day in a big way, because this Roz Chast cartoon had really grabbed me in this week's New Yorker. Of course I could just have been carried away by the power of the poetry. What would Henry W. Longfellow have given to write:

I don't know you,

You don't know me.

Guess that's how

It's meant to be.

HAPPY STRANGER'S DAY!

Or:

We're both alive at the same time,

So here's a card, is that such a crime?

SORRY TO BOTHER YOU.

There's already a website (strangersday.com), though the content so far is kind of, er, limited. And by "limited" I mean limited to:

[You can click to enlarge this, if you really think that'll help.]

It appears that built into Roz's idea of Stranger's Day is a way of getting rid of stuff she doesn't want. Or, as she puts it:

Hello, stranger. We haven’t been properly introduced, and hopefully we never will be. I’ve got lots of friends—actual ones, and also all these other people that Facebook says are my friends. But even though we may never befriend each other, or even “friend” each other, that doesn’t mean we can’t exchange presents. Here are some items I wouldn’t mind giving to you, stranger, on this very special day:

and on the blog version there's a slide show with no fewer than ten such items.



Here's one that particularly caught my attention:

Sometimes I fantasize that I’m going to have people over for what will be the best dinner party since the dawn of time. My guests will all be the smartest, funniest people in the world, and we will all be laughing and talking and basking in the delight of one another’s company. And when dinner is over, I’ll serve dessert on these lovely sunflower plates. I can’t figure out why I’ve never used them.

And here's another:

Have you ever been mad at someone about something that you know is ridiculous, but you’re mad anyway? What do you do? Do you pick a big dumb fight, knowing that it’s not going to solve anything? Or do you take something that belongs to the person, like an ugly tie he never wears or an old CD he’ll never miss, and stuff it in the bottom of a garbage bag? Or you can give it away to a total stranger.

There are also Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram links that you can get from Bob's post (I don't get mixed up with that stuff), via which he invites you to post pictures of stuff that you’d like to give away. Use the tag #strangersday. He says, "We’ll look through the options and post pictures of the ones that we’d most like to receive from a stranger."





NOW FOR ROZ CHAST'S TAKE ON THE SATAN SANDWCH

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Woody Allen Tonight: Part 1 of "Death Knocks" (from "Getting Even")

[The sombre, caped figure huffs audibly and then trips over the window sill and falls into the room.]

DEATH [for it is no one else]: Jesus Christ. I nearly broke my neck.

NAT ACKERMAN [watching with bewilderment]: Who are you?

DEATH: Death.

NAT: Who?

DEATH: Death. Listen -- can I sit down? I nearly broke my neck. I'm shaking like a leaf.

NAT: Who are you?

DEATH: Death. You got a glass of water?

-- the opening of "Death Knocks"

Tonight we continue our Woody Allen sampling, begun Monday night with "A Look at Organized Crime," with a justly famous playlet from 1968, "Death Knocks." Woody's well-known admiration for, or perhaps awe of, Ingmar Bergman seems to me more productively expressed in this rollicking hommage to The Seventh Seal than in his later stiflingly pseudo-Bergmanesque films like Interiors and September. -- Ken





FOR PART 1 OF "DEATH KNOCKS," CLICK HERE





THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Woody Allen Tonight: "A Look at Organized Crime" (from "Getting Even")

"Vincent Columbraro, the Buttered Toast King, has such tight control over all buttered toast moving in and out of New Jersey that one word from him could ruin breakfast for two-thirds of the nation."

-- from "A Look at Organized Crime"

by Ken



Of the 17 pieces in Getting Even, Woody Allen's first book of humor pieces, published in 1971, 11 had first appeared in The New Yorker. (Three had appeared in other publications, and the remaining three had not been previously published.) The earliest of the New Yorker pieces dates from 1966, when Woody was still transitioning from stand-up comedy to movies -- the first film he directed, Take the Money and Run, came out in 1969; the second, Bananas, in 1971.



Woody has maintained a pretty steady production over the years; a quick search of The New Yorker index for him as author turned up 42 listings, the most recent from this past January ("Money Can Buy Happiness -- As If"). This week, in addition to tonight's "A Look at Organized Crime" (from 1970), we're going to have two longer pieces in two parts each: the playlet "Death Knocks" (from 1968) and "Hassidic Tales, with a Guide to Their Interpretation by the Noted Scholar" (from 1970).





FOR TONIGHT'S "LOOK AT ORGANIZED

CRIME," CLICK HERE





THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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The results of "The New Yorker"'s search for a universal cartoon caption

Drawing by John Klossner
Contest #291, June 13, 2011

This week's caption: Because this is a double issue (June 13 & 20), you have extra time to submit your entry -- the deadline is next Sunday, June 19. As usual, everyone 18 or older is eligible to enter except, of course, residents of Quebec, the Land That Captions Forgot.

by Ken

As I've been mentioning, New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff has announced results of his quest for the universal caption.

To back up, in case you don't know, in each issue of The New Yorker, on the last page inside the back cover we get: (a) the new cartoon for captioning, (b) the three finalists chosen from submissions to the most recently processed contest, to be voted on by readers, and (c) the winning caption from among the most recently voted-on finalists. Recently Bob reported on a growing movement toward anti-captioning, in the form of a caption that can be applied universally, without thought or customizing, to absolutely any drawing.

Just to show how this works, in my report on Bob's quest, I reproduced a number of recent contest winners. Here are the drawings without captions.

The winning captions -- I'll leave it to you to determine which goes with which drawing -- were:

"Careful, the water's hard today."
"I'm not going to say the word I'm thinking of."
“Well, you’re the one who insisted on the smoking section.”
"I came, I sawed, I conquered."

But imagine instead that the mind of man could devise a single caption to cover all situations. The ones Bob reported were already in circulation when he announced his initiative were:

"What a misunderstanding!"
"Christ, what an asshole!"
"I just did a huge one in my diaper."
“You many not remember me, but we went to high school together.”
“Who farted?"
"I don't get this cartoon, and I’m in it."
"My being riddled with tumors, this seems insignificant."
"'Surprise!' 'Surprise.' 'Surprise?'"

Try each of these with each of the above captionless drawings.

By the way, I also offered the then-current cartoon-to-be-captioned:

This week we learned the three finalists:

"Part of me thinks you should be seeing a veterinarian."

"So you say you're only half the man you used to be?"

"Frankly, your life sounds quite wonderful."

You can vote here. (I don't believe "none of the above" is an option.) Again, don't any of you filthy Québecois try to sneak through the contest cordon.

Okay, already, you're probably saying, so what did the search for the universal caption bring? Okay, okay.

Some of the submissions were bafflingly specific:

"Your French fry is on fire." -- HumorQ
"Fritz is gone, so you answer if my wife calls." -- HumorQ
"If you want more proof that we're twins, look how we're holding our glasses." -- koba2802
"Do you accept credit cards?" -- sheridanm
"You gonna finish that?" -- mlhumphrey

Others came from the "Anything you can do I can do meta" crowd:

"Err… it looks like whatever I say now it's going to sound like a snobby cartoon caption." -- irinakoryagina
"I don't read The New Yorker!!!" -- pebbleculture
"If you have to ask, cancel your subscription." -- radasc
"It's like we're in a New Yorker cartoon." -- kevintemple
"It may not seem funny right now, but someday someone will use this very situation for a New Yorker Cartoon." -- apatheticagnostic

Many of these were snarky, but one of the meta-humorous ones cleverly manipulates a cliché and works as a caption.

"I wish I'd never been drawn." -- dbozsan

These jokes become a sort of meta-meta-humor, almost like a comedic version of the financial system, where you had derivatives of derivatives of derivatives. I just hope these meta-meta-gags don't cause a humor meltdown.

The majority of entrants took a more straightforward approach: an ambiguous catchphrase that makes the viewer imagine a scenario or backstory, however vague, for almost any image.

"I don't belong here." -- potts
"This isn't how I saw it playing out, either." -- herreratim
"This happens more often than you might suspect." -- michaeldoleman
"Well, this is awkward!" -- lisah405
"Some things defy the usual explanations." -- hhickman

Another approach was to use a media reference or a topic in the news.

"It's sad to think I'll never talk about this on Oprah." -- nosnivel
"It's been a year and I still don't understand LOST." -- koba2802
"This would make a great reality show." -- twilightzoner
"So what. The world is ending October 21st." -- zannieg

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Confidential to Anthony W. of Brooklyn -- you twit! (Our promise: no puns added)

Plus: NY-er cartoon editor Bob Mankoff has what one might hope is the last word on the subject

Can I assume that no caption is required?

by Ken

So, Anthony, it turns out that the whole brouhaha came about because you screwed up a single character -- instead of typing "D" to send your, er, business as a "direct message," you typed "@," which sent it "to" the designated recipient all right but made it viewable to one and all. Bianca Bosker has all this and much more on Huffpost Tech (The Twitter Typo That Exposed Anthony Weiner), including the reminder, which should be embarrassing all around, that the New York Times dubbed you a "technophile."

If it's any consolation, Anthony, Bianca reports: "Michael Fertik, CEO of Reputation.com, which helps people manage their online reputations, says the accidental exposure of messages that were meant to be private happens 'millions of times a day.'"

I'm not going to ask you, "How could you be so stupid?" Casting no aspersions,it seems to come with the territory for certain power-driven personality types. (Okay, it's just possible that a couple of aspersions got cast there. After all, we're all only human.) It's bad enough that you were dopey enough to be carrying on this way online. As Bianca points out:

Privacy experts say that Weinergate underscores the importance of users understanding these social networking sites for what they are: social platforms meant to help people connect with one another, broadcast their ideas and create stores of personal information online. Services like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are built for sharing, not secrets.

"Twitter was not really designed for privacy. If you do not want it public, don't put it on Twitter," said Chet Wisniewski, a security expert who writes for a blog run by Sophos, a software provider. "People shouldn't consider social networks a place to communicate private things. ... These services are designed to share, and privacy is a second consideration."

How humiliating is it that you should be hearing this from me, a card-carrying Twitterphobe? But as I say, this is almost the least of it.

Sure, the Twitter screw-up was embarrassing. For a lot of people, though, the sticking point is going to be all the lying that followed, yet another case of a self-important pol violating the Richard M. Nixon Memorial Adage about the killer being not the deed itself but the cover-up.

This morning WNYC radio political analyst Joyce Purnick was recalling how, way back when, when you first sought the Democratic nomination for your congressional district, a strange case developed of virulently racist materials being spontaneously distributed in the district smearing one of the other candidates, and when fingers started pointing at you as the responsible party, you swore just as sincerely as we saw you swearing recently that you had nothing to do with it, only you had to admit eventually that you had everything to do with it, on account of it was proved that you did. For future reference (assuming you have a future), when you're caught with your pants down, as it were, it's too late to come clean.

I know I promised not to ask, but sheesh, how could you be so stupid? Probably it has something to do with the insight of that noted philosopher of the heart, Woody Allen, who so famously explained, "The heart wants what it wants," except in your case the body parts in question seem to be located lower than the heart. Possibly too it has something to do with your impression, conveyed publicly through such feats as your showoffy dating -- prior to your marriage, of course -- that you think women think you're some hot stuff. This is probably not what the legendary producer Max Bialystock had in mind when he declared his philosophy: "If you've got it, baby, flaunt it," but it's close enough.

My gosh, when you find yourself looking up at Harry Reid perched precariously up there on the moral high ground, you know you've dug yourself one heckuva crater.


FINALLY -- OH, IF ONLY! -- NEW YORKER
CARTOON EDITOR BOB MANKOFF WEIGHS IN

Barring unforeseen developments, tomorrow I'm going to be reporting on the just-announced results of New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff's search for the universal cartoon caption. You may recall that two candidates already before the public were:

"What a misunderstanding" (from digital artist Cory Arcangel)

"Christ, what an asshole!" (from Charles Lavoie)

Bob M concludes his "Cartoon Blog" report today on the universal-caption quest:

The submissions came in before the Anthony Weiner scandal broke, but the course of Weinergate can be nicely bookended by our two main contenders. When Weiner claimed his Twitter account had been hacked, you thought, “What a misunderstanding!” But by the time he tearfully confessed you were more likely to think, “Christ, what an asshole!”

Really, is there anything more that needs to be said? Except maybe this --


FINAL NOTE ON THE OUTRAGE RE. ANTHONY W. VOICED
BY REPUBLICAN PARAGONS OF MORALITY (HA-HA!)

Considering what you clowns do to destroy ordinary decency every second of every minute of every day of every year, you're kidding about Anthony W. being some sort of menace to the republic, right? Well, I suppose it's one way of diverting attention from what you've done with every accursed breath you've drawn in your polluted lives.

Assuming it's laffs you're going for, though, why not do it right and make Sen. David "The Diaper Man Cometh" Vitter your point man for this comedy crusade?

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Ring Lardner Tonight: Can you guess who wrote these three "Talk of the Town" items about Ring?

Well, sure, you know which way we run the bases in this country, but what if you were a boy from Niles, Michigan, who learned your baseball in England?

by Ken

The combination of Ring's wit and his singular ability to wring confusion out of order, or what passed for order, made him eminently, er, citable. For tonight I've plucked three "Talk of the Town" items out of The New Yorker's archives, and in addition to being entertained, you get to guess who wrote them. (Of course until the Tina Brown era "Talk" items were always published unsigned, but one of the neat things about the extremely neat New Yorker index is that authorship of many originally unsigned pieces is revealed and fully indexed. I assume that many unsigned pieces remain unattributed, since the format of unattributed authorship allowed for multiple and/or "compound" authorship. "Talk" pieces, for example, were frequently reported by a staff reporter and written by a staff editor.)

Answers appear at the end, with scoring instructions.


FOR TONIGHT'S RING LARDNER-THEMED
"TALK OF THE TOWN" ITEMS, CLICK HERE


SUNDAY IN THURBER TONIGHT: Part 1 of "The Greatest Man in the World"


THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, BOB AND RAY, E. B. WHITE, and JEAN SHEPHERD TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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"What a misunderstanding!": "New Yorker" cartoon editor Bob Mankoff reports on the quest for the "universal" cartoon caption

Drawing by Ariel Molvig
Contest #289, May 30, 2011

This is the current captionless cartoon for The New Yorker's weekly Cartoon Caption Contest. Entries -- 250 characters or fewer -- are accepted through May 29.

by Ken

As I've had a number of occasions to mention -- most recently when the subject was Charlie Sheen -- I'm a big fan of New Yorker cartoon editor (and prolific cartoonist himself) Bob Mankoff's blogposts. You can sign up for an e-mailed version so you don't have to remember to check the magazine's website for them. (On the home page, look down on the right side for a tab that gives you checkboxes for two weekly NEWSLETTERS: "This Week" and "Cartoons.")

This week Bob returns to a fertile blog topic, the magazine's weekly cartoon-caption contest, in which a captionless drawing -- normally by one of the magazine's large roster of regular cartoonists -- is published and readers 18 or older everywhere in the world except Quebec are invited to submit captions. (I've spent a lot of time trying to come up with a working theory for the Quebec Exclusion.)

This week's contest cartoon, for example, is at the top of this post. From among the apparently huge number of submissions the usual three finalists will be chosen and published -- online as of Monday, June 6; in print in the issue of June 13 & 20 -- for reader voting that determines the eventually posted winning caption. This week's winner, for example, is:

"I came, I sawed, I conquered."
Juli Rodgers, Santa Fe, N.M.

Second place, in case you're wondering, went to: "I must find the tree that killed my father" (Graham Watling, Brooklyn, N.Y.). Third place went to: "That one was asking for it" (Ian Spain, Ann Arbor, Mich.).

As we've learned from some of Bob Mankoff's blogposts, his department maintains extensive records of submissions. For example, in his April 25 post, "Roger Ebert Wins the Cartoon Caption Contest," he was able to report that that week's winner had entered 107 contests before: "To the delight of film fans, film-criticism fans, Caption Contest fans, and Roger Ebert fans -- and count me among all of the above -- Mr. Ebert has finally fulfilled his quest to win The New Yorker Caption Contest." He quoted from a July 2009 Chicago Sun-Times blogpost, "The New Yorker. No, The New Yorker," in which Mr. Ebert lamented:

I have entered the New Yorker’s Cartoon Caption Contest almost weekly virtually since it began and have never even been a finalist. Mark Twain advised: "Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for." I have done more writing for free for the New Yorker in the last five years than for anybody in the previous 40 years.

It’s not that I think my cartoon captions are better than anyone else's, although some weeks, understandably, I do. It's that just once I want to see one of my damn captions in the magazine that publishes the best cartoons in the world. Is that too much to ask?

"Done," Bob Mankoff replied in the April 25 post, which included the Ebert winning entry:

(By the way, there's also a carefully maintained online archive of previous contests.)

In his May 21 post, "Caption Contest Devotees," referring back to the April 25 Ebert post, Bob noted that Roger's 107 contests entered paled beside "the ten most devoted entrants," whom he listed with totals between 279 and 262 -- all without winning!

But I applaud their persistence. As I’ve pointed out, persistence in the face of failure is often the key to eventual success, except in skydiving.

Persistence certainly paid off for Mr. Don Symons, who entered two hundred and thirty-one contests before winning:

This week Bob returns to the subject in a glorious post called "The Universal Caption," taking off from the conviction of Cory Arcangel, "the digital artist profiled in this week's issue of The New Yorker": “I think the same joke over and over becomes something eternal.” "Week after week," Bob notes, "Arcangel has taken the images from The New Yorker Caption Contest and supplied them with the same caption: 'What a misunderstanding!'" He offers some samples starting with:

(The winning caption: “Well, you’re the one who insisted on the smoking section.”)

Then he offers the cartoon with the winning caption by Don Symons (see above), “Careful, the water’s hard today," and the one with the newly announced winner (see above), Juli Rodgers' “I came, I sawed, I conquered.”

It appears that there's a history to the quest for the universal caption. "Christ, what an asshole!" has been proposed, and now, Bob reports, New Yorker cartoonists are pitching in, starting with the suggestion from David Sipress that this caption (from a cartoon by Jack Ziegler) could fit the bill:


Other New Yorker cartoonists have proposed --

Matt Diffee: “You many not remember me, but we went to high school together.”
Farley Katz: “Who farted?”
Kim Warp: “I don’t get this cartoon, and I’m in it.”
Emily Flake: “My being riddled with tumors, this seems insignificant.”
Zach Kanin: “Surprise!” “Surprise.” “Surprise?”

Try each of these with all of the cartoons above.


AND IF YOU HAVE YOUR OWN SUGGESTION --

Bob provides a Twitter address for posting it, promising to "round up the best of them."

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