Punny Melrose Man Wins 'New Yorker' Caption Contest

MELROSE, MA — Alan Leo recently won the New Yorker's caption contest, slapping some cultural wit onto an old-timey fairy tale. We caught up with Leo over the holiday week:

Q: Can you give me a short glimpse into your 'biometrics' - where do you live in Melrose?

A: In a ridiculously overpriced Victorian, like most folks here. Not that I'm complaining. Mine's blue, and it's near the Common.

Q: How long have you been here?

A: Long enough to miss Breads 'n' Bits but not long enough to miss Caruso's.

Q: Are you involved in anything?

A: What have you heard? Do I need a lawyer?

Q: How many kids?

A: Two-ish. They're in the Melrose Public Schools, which reminds me: Did you know Melrose has the worst teacher pay inside 495? The worst. Look it up. We should all be embarrassed, and then we should fix it.

Q: What do you do?

A: I'm a stay-at-home dad and teacher-pay googler.

Q: The obvious questions: Why this piece? What inspired it? Have you submitted others before? What was your immediate reaction when you found out you won?

A: So many questions! For unfamiliar readers, The New Yorker is a magazine for and about therapists' waiting rooms, with reviews of restaurants you will never visit and poems about the weather but also divorce. A contest at the back of each issue invites readers to submit a caption for a one-panel cartoon. They get about 5,000 entries, most painfully unfunny.

This time, the cartoon was a fairy-tale tower, a princess above and a prince below, with a Rapunzel vibe. The twist was that the prince had the super long hair, stretching up to the princess. Winning captions always tie together the context (in this case, the Rapunzel story) with the anomaly (his hair), in a tidy and surprising way. I hoped my caption—"It is I, Manbunzel"—did that, and I guess the voters thought it did.

I was surprised to win, but even more surprised to be selected as a finalist. The New Yorker is known (if at all) for its dry humor, and puns almost never win. But my family loves a good pun, so I went for it.

Q: This may seem like a strange question, but what's the cooler part: Seeing your name in the New Yorker or your art [we meant to ask caption!]?

A: It's definitely cool seeing my name in print outside the police log. But it's not my art. The cartoonist is the very talented Michael Maslin. I merely wrote the brilliant caption.

Q: Come on, be honest: Is this some satire partially inspired by your - ahem - lack of manbun?

A: Oh totally. I'm consumed by bun envy. Your readers should know that I look like Telly Savalas, if he had the chin and body of Telly the Muppet. So I compensate.

Q: What's next? Another contest somewhere? Fully satisfied with this win and retiring the pencil for awhile?

A: I'm planning to leverage my staggering fame into a line of man-bun-care products—Manditioner, the Scrunch-He, and so forth. I will be the Kylie Jenner of man buns.

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Courtesy photo