Last week’s contest to provide a funny caption for this Magritte painting
brought forth hundreds of submissions. Some were quite droll, but many, unfortunately, fell into the “ce n’est pas drôle” category. Most of the time, the failure was not in the idea but in the wording. There were lots of flu-season captions:
The following flu caption only made sense if you knew that the painting was finished in 1928: “Honey, it’s been ten years since the ‘Spanish flu’ epidemic. Don’t you think we can remove these?”
All of these submissions were O.K. idea-wise, but did not cut it word-wise. As Mark Twain said, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” For me, lightning struck with David Jewell’s elegant and allusive “Love in a Time of Influenza.” So I’m choosing that as one of my favorites.
Moving on from lightning, lighting (or, sometimes, the preferred lack of it) during intimacy
was another prominent theme for the captioneers. Tara Dowd’s “Couldn’t we have just turned off the lights?” and Ryan Wong’s “Darling, couldn’t we go back to just turning off the lights?” are essentially the same, but for some reason I liked Wong’s better. Then, for no reason at all, Dowd’s seemed preferable, but then I figured some reason has to be better than no reason at all, so I ended up staying with Wong’s as choice two.
The submitter Barry Finkelstein seized on the obvious—Magritte’s lovers cannot see each other—to come up with “I’m seeing someone else.” That’s a ridiculously obvious caption—once you see it, that is. Choice three.
My fourth and final choice focusses on the incongruous element in the painting that makes it worthy of a caption contest: namely, the barrier of fabric impeding the lovers’ intimacy. Some captions in this vein seized on the fact that the impediment might not be just to kissing but to life itself, causing suffocation. Gloria Hooper’s was typical: “Darling, I can’t breathe.”
But, for me, the most interesting of this group was one—the only one, in fact—that viewed the fabric not as a turn-off but a turn-on. Here is Dave Dorman’s very clever, very crazy entry: “If muslin be the food of love, chew on.”
So, until next time, chew on that, but don’t chew me out if yours wasn’t picked. Taking humor that seriously will take all the fun out of it. Believe me, I know.