This Robot Will Help You Win The New Yorker’s Cartoon Caption Contest

Each week The New Yorker invites readers to submit captions to cartoons drawn by the magazine’s illustrators. Writers have to generate a quip that’s funny and also perfectly mimics the magazine’s sensibilities. A deep knowledge of The New Yorker is a prerequisite. Or is it?

The Verge collected all the first, second, and third place winning entries going back to when the magazine introduced the competition in 2005 — 1,425 in total. They ran them through a Markov text generator program that analyzes the winning captions and generates new, randomized entries that echo the original set.

Drawing by Michael Crawford, Contest #487, August 31, 2015

Scroll to the end of the article to play and let me know if you win.

Via