Ĥ 1 if that ’s elsie, you have n’t seen me. ģ 0 if it ’s theseus, tell him to get lost. ġ 0 if it ’s theseus, tell him i ’ll be back in the labyrinth just as soon as happy hour is over. The tfidf scores used to build the lexical network are used in method OR4. , to cluster the captions in each contest thematically the sizes of these clusters comprise method OR3. We also used a graph clustering method, previously used in King et al. To identify the most central caption in each contest (method OR1 ) and the one with the highest lexrank score (method OR2 ). We built a lexical network out of the captions for each contest. Figure 1: Cartoon number 31 Figure 2: Cartoon number 32 2 Related Work Then, we performed Amazon Mechanical Turk experiments in which we asked Turkers to judge which of the selected captions is funnier. We used each of these methods to independently rank all captions from our corpus and selected the top captions for each method. We developed a set of unsupervised methods for ranking captions based on features such as originality, centrality, sentiment, concreteness, grammaticality, human-centeredness, etc. In this paper, we take a computational approach to studying the contest to gain insights into what differentiates funny captions from the rest. The contest has become a cultural phenomenon and has generated a lot of discussion as to what makes a cartoon funny (at least, to the readers of the New Yorker). They pick the top 3 submitted captions and ask the readers to pick the weekly winner. Figures 1 and 2 ) and ask readers to come up with a funny caption for it. Each week, the editors post a cartoon (cf. Post captions in the comments section (preferred), or if you’re shy, email them to by Anne Sax.The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest has been running for more than 10 years. This time, you’ll get no such leading leading statement - here’s the cartoon, let your inspiration run wild: Perhaps I poisoned (ha) the ID entries by introducing the drawing with this gloomy sentence: “We must be vigilant to the ever rising threat of both foodborne pathogens and carcinogenic heterocyclic amines.” Come to think of it, that alone could have been a (very unfunny) caption. They always give me heartburn.” (Aaron Kassoff) “Sorry, I was using fire in the belly as a figure of speech.” (JRMD).“No thanks, I’m watching my carbon footprint.” (the now-famous Philip Morganelli).Yet none of the top three captions chosen by our AHA (Advanced Humor Algorithm) had anything remotely to do with infectious food safety: Lawrence Madoff, an ID doctor who works at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, who periodically attends our neighborhood cookouts - you can guess Larry’s emphatic answer to the question, “And how would you like that done?” Perhaps he will be introducing his own line of crispy fast food soon. If you’re wondering what I mean, take a look at this most unappetizing food truck:Ĭoncern about underdone burgers prompted my next door neighbors Ben and Carol to call the well-done hockey pucks favored by ID specialists “Madoff burgers”. With such an ID-oriented crowd, I figured the obviously very well-done burgers would generate plenty of funny captions about food safety. We’ll give Philip Morganelli the top prize on this one, though he’ll need to share the generous honorarium with John Lee, who introduced the whole “carbon footprint” theme and might have provided Philip some inspiration.īut I confess this contest turned out a bit differently than anticipated. “No thanks, I’m watching my carbon footprint.”
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