New Yorker cartoons are easy to mock – but could you create one yourself?

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/27/new-yorker-cartoon-parody

Version 0 of 1.

New Yorker cartoons: love them or hate them, you can’t ignore them, especially when they pop up perkily and inappropriately in the middle of a 3,000-word article about Isis or West Virginia meth addicts.

Almost funny, not quite edgy, and inextricably tied to the concerns of upper-middle-class Manhattanites, their format is so ripe for parody that, as the Atlantic reported this week, the internet’s consensus seems to be that each of them would work just as well with these three captions: “Christ, what an asshole!”, “What a misunderstanding!” and “Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.”

pic.twitter.com/9r6KdvoKPL

@frank_chimero pic.twitter.com/brbcUjSpyY

@frank_chimero I wish I had thought of this pic.twitter.com/MAighK2gfS

Sure, they’re easy to mock. But could you write one yourself? Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes once tried, and came up with a pig at a complaints department saying: “I wish I was taller.”

Is it really that easy?

I had a go, and came up with these 10. If you can beat them, go for it. You know where the comments box is.

1. The Loch Ness Monster pops up in the East River: “Darn GPS!”

2. A cat on the phone to a pet-food store: “Do you do home delivery?”

3. A man in a barber’s shop waiting to get his hair cut: “Give me a Donald Trump!”

4. Kermit the frog arrested by the vice squad after putting money in a piggy bank: “This is entrapment!”

5. A criminal pops up in the middle of a police station having dug a tunnel out of prison: “Darn GPS!”

6. Superman, Batman and the Flash sit in a bar in an image resembling Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. No caption – it’s a commentary on our debased popular culture.

7. ET with an iPhone. “ET ... text home ...”

8. Two men who look like characters from Picasso paintings standing in front of a Picasso painting at the Museum of Modern Art. “Well, he got your nose right.”

9. A passenger trying to pick up an alien yellow cab driver in space. “Sorry, buddy, I ain’t going to Brooklyn.”

10. A bird flies into the window of a skyscraper. “Darn GPS!”