Loquation, Loquation, Loquation
The Art of the Long Caption Cartoon
Anyone who’s been cartooning long enough will tell you that you gotta keep your captions short. A good cartoon depends on a quick, precise caption that edits out any extraneous words. The shorter, the better. In fact, many cartoonists feel that the captionless cartoon is the most ‘pure’ kind of cartooning, simple minimalism at its best. Well I, Ellis Rosen, am here to talk about a different kind of cartoon: The Long Caption.
Yes, The Long Caption is every cartoonist's secret naughty thrill. It's how we get our rocks off. In a business that depends on quick ephemeral gags, the long caption allows us to indulge in our lust for words, forcing the viewer to linger on them for more than just a few seconds. Personally I have a box of cartoons with long captions that I keep under my bed, and when no one is looking, I go through them and cackle with sick glee. “Ha!” I think, “reading these cartoons takes slightly longer than usual!” Oh, and how I laugh. I laugh long into the dark foreboding night.
Anywho! I love a good captionless cartoon as much as the next cartoonist. I get why they are beloved. But I would argue that it's much harder to make a funny long-captioned cartoon than it is to make a funny captionless one. Funny is the key word. Anyone can write the entirety of Ulysses under a picture, but making someone laugh at all that reading is a tricky, tricky trick.
So how do you pull it off? Well, I would say that the caption’s length has to be the joke itself, but what that looks like can be different. Maybe it’s a long caption that acts as a diversion from the actual issue at hand. Maybe it's a long caption that lampoons a naturally long description or title. It’s hard to explain. It might be better just to show you these select long-captioned cartoons from the Toonstackers here.
Navied Mahdavian
Back in the early 2010s (the “teens” or “teensies,” if you will), I owned and operated a business called Perissology Inc.™ Perissology (n. pɛrɪˈsɒlədʒɪ) means the use of a superfluity of words (or using more words than is necessary, if you will). The idea was I’d buy and sell words. You pay me cold hard cash, I give you cold hard words (or glacial locutions, if you will). I’d also trade words if you owned one I didn’t have in my collection. You see, I was a man in search of words–rare, hard-to-reach ones, like words someone had set on a kitchen shelf just out of reach. Back then, I was only 5’8” so there was a lot just out of reach. Words cost 50 cents a pop, which gave you the definition and a sentence so you could immediately wow your friends and colleagues (back then, I was fun at parties). For an extra 25 cents, I’d sell you the etymology. Quite a deal, I know .
All of which is to say, these cartoons are all perissologic.
That word is on the house.
Kendra Allenby
I get contracts that are depressingly similar to this. This partly explains why contractors are expensive when they work with big companies because their legal team is 7 full time law school graduates and my legal team is me, a cup of coffee, and an hour and a half of me rolling my eyes so hard it makes my head hurt and combing through pages of grabby, gobbledygook that you have to go through so you can go back to a finance company and explain that just because you drew them a picture doesn’t mean they get your soul.
Hilary Campbell
I love a long rambling caption, especially when it’s related to my mother, or any mother, really. But I have to be clear, my mother never said this specific sentence. When this cartoon was published in The New Yorker she called me and was like “I never said that! People in the neighborhood are like, you said that? And I’m like, I never said that! It’s just a joke! It’s not real! I don’t even know what wine it is! And I haven’t watched Ina Garten in years! And I only drink Kenwood sauvignon blanc anyway! I never said that!”
Jessica Ziegler on Jack Ziegler’s Cartoon
Having been involved in the CartoonStock caption contest over the past three+ years, I can tell you that the commonly accepted "rule" (please refer to the Cartoon Rule Book, chapter 12, section 11, subsection 3b) is that brevity is the soul of wit. This is an especially valuable rule for captioneer hopefuls; trust me. However, sometimes true pros, like Jack Ziegler, can break free, using longer captions to develop a more compelling character. Take this poor bastard. This cartoon wouldn't be as funny without the long, distraction-laden passage. Sometimes, more words IS the joke.
Ed Steed
Captions should be short. But you are allowed to do a long one about once every ten years.
Johnny DiNapoli
I think the idea of long captions is funny, because a “long” caption is what, like five sentences? That’s nothing! You don’t have time for that? I like these kinds of cartoons, because they usually have a playfulness that’s reigned in for more conventional single panel gags. They take on their own, weird little personalities, and I think that’s nice.
Sofia Warren
A long-caption cartoon is a walk in the fog. Where are you going? It’s futile to guess; you can only surrender to moving one foot forward, then the next, then the next, then the next (you are a centipede). Eventually—maybe—you’ll have a sense of the terrain shifting, and then, out of nowhere, you’ll walk full-frontal-smack into a punchline. Or maybe not. But either way, you needed a walk.
Amy Kurzweil
… Signal, Telegram, TikTok, Slack, Parlor, Patreon, Clubhouse, Nest, YouTube, DoorDash, Venmo, Uber, Lyft, Waze, Google maps, Google Docs, Google Photos, Google Everything, iPhotos, i-Everything, my period tracker, my Wordle score, my reflection in the camera app, my grades from college, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, what people are saying about the headlines in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, the door to make sure it’s locked (August, Ring Latch, etc), the oven to see if it’s off (ok there isn’t an app for this but there should be), Medium, Reddit, SUBSTACK…
Couldn’t we say the internet is just one extra-long caption on this joke we call life?
Ellis Rosen
What I like about this cartoon is that it takes the exciting parlance of a football announcer and combines it with the nagging reminder that your life will be over before you can blink. It needs a long caption to pull it off: the caption utilizes both the play-by-play action of the game and each notable phase of this man's life and death. It’s a balancing act: too many life details, the joke lingers too long and loses its appeal. Not enough details and the joke becomes rather grim. Imagine if the joke was “He’s at the 20, the 10, he’s dead!” Eek. Instilling enough of this mans life, and making that life pleasant, strengthens the joke. The only problem with a longer caption is that it sucks even more time away from your precious existence, knowing that every single second is a valuable gift that death takes away from you for all eternity. Also, go Giants!
And as always…
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