alt=Lottie Elizabeth JohnsonChristine Hurt is a proud two-time winner of The New Yorker’s cartoon caption contest — so much so that one of her winning captions is framed in her office at Brigham Young University.
“Then maybe you should just tell me what you want for your birthday instead of saying you don’t care,” a husband tells his visibly upset wife as 11 monkeys jump around her.
Winning that contest is also what the law professor chose to talk about when she competed on “Jeopardy!” in 2019 and had a minute to chat — and impress — the late Alex Trebek.
Now, The New Yorker contest success continues in Hurt’s family for another generation. Her 19-year-old son, Luke Stancil, is the most recent winner of the contest — which generally receives about 5,000 entries each week, Hurt said.
In the latest New Yorker cartoon, a man with a pair of binoculars looks at a Godzilla-sized snail that has overtaken a busy city street and destroyed just about everything in its path.
Stancil’s winning caption? “I told you we should have salted the roads.”
Stancil — who has entered the contest several times — told the Deseret News he came up with the caption after recently experiencing a winter storm in Houston, where he attends Rice University.
“I remembered this ‘Phineas and Ferb’ episode where they stop the Snail special agent by putting a ring of salt around it, which led me to think how I wish they salted the roads and sidewalks this week in Houston,” Stancil wrote in an email to the Deseret News.
For the past few weeks, Stancil had been sending his caption ideas to his two-time winning mom. He said this was the first time she ever liked the first caption he came up with, and he didn’t hesitate to submit.
Stancil’s winning caption will remain on The New Yorker website for the rest of the week.