Crowdsourcing Humor

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It's a cartoonist's job to make jokes. What happens when the audience picks the punchline?

Each week, The New Yorker provides its readers with a cartoon in need of a caption. Readers submit captions, the publication chooses three finalists, and readers vote for their favorites. It's humor—crowdsourced—and with more than 2 million submissions provided by 500,000 participants, it offers tremendous insight into what makes us laugh.

In a fast-paced and funny talk, Bob Mankoff, The New Yorker magazine's cartoon editor and cartoonist, analyzes the lessons we learn from crowdsourced humor. Along the way, he'll explore how cartoons work (or sometimes don't) and what crowds can tell us about a good joke.

Presenters

Bob Mankoff

Cartoon Editor

The New Yorker

Bob Mankoff is the cartoon editor of The New Yorker, where he selects cartoons for publication in the magazine. More than 800 of his cartoons have been published in The New Yorker in the past 30 years, including the best-selling New Yorker cartoon of all time.

He is the author of the book “The Naked Cartoonist: A New Way to Enhance Your Creativity,” published in 2002, about the creative process behind developing magazine-style cartoons, as well as his forthcoming memoir "How About Never? Is Never Good For You? A Life in Cartoons," which will arrive in bookstores March 25, 2014. He has also edited dozens of cartoon books and published four of his own. Notably, he edited “The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker,” the best-selling coffee-table book for the 2004 holiday season, featuring all 68,647 cartoons published in The New Yorker since its début, in 1925.

Mankoff graduated from Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences in 1966. He lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, with his wife, Cory, and their two children.