New Yorker cartoons redone with literal captions

The Monkeys You Ordered takes New Yorker cartoons and changes the captions to match the scene. The joke is that there is no joke. And it's actually pretty funny.

Thanks wastrel!

• [Lobster]

  “Our dog is fucking huge.”

  It suuuure is. :D

• [YarbroughFair]

  My partner get’s angry with me when I peer through my glasses at him when he tries to read New Yorker shouting “I don’t get it, something’s wrong with you if you do.” Now the shoes on the other foot. Touche!

• [Anonymous]

  my only critique is that i wish it had the original headline next to the new one for those of us that dont know

  • [Guillaume Filion]

    They were cartoons in the caption contest, they didn’t have any captions.
    It was up to readers to submit their own captions.

• [freshacconci]

  Those are actually funny. Kind of Far Sidish.

• [Anonymous]

  This is something like Literal Economist Covers (http://literaleconomist.tumblr.com). Scroll through to see my favourite, “Mr President, That’s Not Air Force One” (Obama walking up a boarding ramp into the mouth of a bear).

• [carolw]

  Christ, what an asshole.

• [Halloween Jack]

  Cute, although the “Christ, what an asshole” meme still rules.

  By the way, does anyone else remember P.C. Vey doing cartoons for Playboy back in the day? Whenever I see his work in the New Yorker, I’m always a little startled to see that it doesn’t involve sex or nudity.

  • [Anonymous]

    Halloween Jack:

    Yes, I remember! Also, Mr. Gross has been appearing in the New Yorker, and I can’t help remembering the truly obscene cartoons he did for the National Lampoon back in the ’70s.

    By the way, when did James Thurber fall off the map? No one seems to remember, or reference, or care about him anymore. His career spanned decades, his books were wonderful, he fought McCarthyism in the ’50s, and is forgotten today.

    I thought I’d see “The Unicorn In The Garden” or “The Last Flower” or “The War Between Men and Women” in BoingBoing, but it’s like he never existed.

• [Anonymous]

  Now I’m dying to know what the actual captions were.

• [wastrel]

  All due credit, I found it via drawn.ca:

  http://blog.drawn.ca/post/2731299573/new-yorker-cartoons-with-literal-captions

• [Anonymous]

  Boing’d

• [Anonymous]

  I laughed, and then boinboing broke the site

  …myrelf rotwing? really?

• [toxonix]

  New Yorker cartoons are never funny and often depressingly stupid with their cliche captions intact.
  For example, anyone can see that this is hilarious without a caption:
  http://www.bullseyerooster.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/contest_p465.jpg

  There is no caption that could do anything but ruin that picture.

• [cynthiab]

  Can’t you just imagine them being read by the girl who does “Kittens Inspired by Kittens.”

• [CleanStar]

  Sometimes a good cartoon doesn’t need a caption at all.
  A picture says more than 1000 words.

• [Anonymous]

  I used to love New Yorker comics… some of them were masterpieces.

  but I don’t know, lately they just don’t seem funny at all. Some of them are quite mediocre.

  Is it a dying art?

• [Antinous / Moderator]

  These are quite funny, but it would be nice to see the original caption for contrast.

• [Andrew Ferguson]

  @wastrel: It’s like you found a secret treasure trove of never-before-seen Far Side comics.

• [pidg]

  Reminded me of The Far Side too. In particular the “Cow Tools” one, which apparently Larson got hundreds of complaint letters about from people who ‘didn’t get’ it.

• [Mark Frauenfelder]

  Some of these made me laugh out loud.

• [Jonathan Badger]

  Actually a *lot* of great New Yorker cartoons are as literal as these. My favorite had two people looking at a big sign that says “Stop and Think” and the caption was “It really makes you stop and think, doesn’t it?”

  • [Raj77]

    I… don’t see where the funny is. And I grew up on Thurber.

• [penguinchris]

  What I don’t understand, is people who claim to not understand the humor in New Yorker cartoons. They’re very similar to The Far Side, and few people regularly claim to not like The Far Side. I think people just like to feel smug about not liking them.

  As a kid, I quickly tired of the comics in the newspaper – they were lame as hell, lowest-common-denominator kind of stuff. Web comics weren’t around yet, and I could never get into comic books. But I loved comics, and loved the cartoons in the New Yorker, which my grandmother subscribes to and always has huge piles of lying around. They really appealed to me at a time when no other comics I had access to could satisfy me (now, there are lots of webcomics I enjoy).

• [lewis stoole]

  very funny!

• [sean]

  “I asked for a TUNA, not a tune-up!” Oh sorry, that’s not the way you’re supposed to do it.

• [blueelm]

  I like these!