Christ, what an asshole” seems a fitting caption for nearly every New Yorker cartoon, and yet it’s only been submitted 27 times out of well over 1.5 million entries in the magazine’s caption contest. We’ve found one place the Internet’s trolls haven’t managed to permeate.
The “CWAA” revelation dates all the way back to February 2006, from a blog post by Charles LaVoie at modernarthur.com entitled “How ‘Christ, What An Asshole!” is the Answer to the New Yorker Magazine Caption Contest” (the blog is no longer maintained, but the page is viewable via the Wayback Machine). LaVoie displays several example caption contest cartoons demonstrating the broad applicability of the phrase to near every New Yorkercartoon.
The blog entry was discovered by reddit just over 4 years later, with the most prominent entry stating “Every New Yorker cartoon can be captioned with ‘Christ, what an asshole!’ without reducing its comedy value.” Another blog, robertsinclair.net, noted that the phrase also works in the last panel of “virtually all comics, old and new.” “CWAA” remains a popular caption across artistic disciplines on the Internet.
Ars inquired at the New Yorker (a sister publication of Ars) to see how many times the phrase has actually been submitted as an entry in the caption contest. “A total of 27 times for the first 332 contests, and there were 23 contests in which it occurred,” said Bob Mankoff, cartoon editor at theNew Yorker—a mercifully low number, for a contest with a Web submission form. Mankoff noted that the average number of submissions for each contest is over 5,000, so there is remarkably little “CWAA” noise.
There are many meta-humor takes on New Yorker caption contest cartoons, said Mankoff. This includes “What a misunderstanding!,” from a blog maintained by Cory Arcangel, which Mankoff said probably fits more contests than “CWAA.” Others are “mashups with Kanye West tweets, Charlie Sheen rants, and Rick Santorum’s political pontifications,” said Mankoff. “We take no umbrage at any of these, although we don’t think that meta is necessarily beta.” We’re glad to see the Internet can goof around without making Mankoff’s job any harder.