"Your right or my right?" was a nice touch. Definitely funnier than most of the caption contest winners.

What I've noticed about this contest is that most of the cartoons contributed by the magazine's regular cartoonists are nothing like the ones they do for themselves. The typical New Yorker cartoon is a boss behind a desk talking to a subordinate, or a married couple in their living room talking to each other, or two dogs talking to each other, etc. In other words, the only thing interesting about them is the caption (which usually isn't).

But instead, the pictures in the caption contest are packed with extravagant, high-concept images that are so specific that they leave very little room for manoeuvering. The winning caption usually ends up referring to the subject of the cartoon in a very obvious way. Yours was actually almost too subtle to win -- the guy never explicitly refers to the monster.

I disagree. First, I am always surprised how much room there is for maneuvering ... although there are the occasional cartoons that produce lame and boring results (like the fisherman on the analyst's couch hallucinating fishes).

This particular one is funny, but, in my opinion, glaringly obvious. I wanted to send in basically the same but forgot the timeline, and I am almost sure there were hundreds of similar captions sent in, and this one was chosen due to its concise wording (and probably there was some luck involved, too). But as mentioned above, I am often surprised how often two or even three really good and imaginative captions come up.

I was flipping thru the caption contest winners and saw this one before I knew that it was the author's winning submission. Of the 20 or 30 I saw, this was the one I laughed out loud to.
 

W'hat--you didn't chuckle at mine?? (see #139). I'm still basking in the ever-fainter glow of my 15 minutes....

But is there an actual "Weekly Cartoon E-Newsletter"?

Everytime I submit a caption it asks if I want to subscribe, I always check "yes", I've never received any newsletter.