Legal News

The Law Blog Lawyer of the Day: Larry Wood

By Ashby Jones

People have their talents. Adam Lambert can sing; Cristiano Ronaldo can score; and Larry Wood can flat-out rock the New Yorker magazine’s Cartoon Caption Contest.

Longtime New Yorker readers are familiar with the contest, which has been running on the back page of the magazine since 2005. Readers are invited to provide a wordless cartoon with their own caption. In a subsequent issue, the magazine’s editors ask readers to select a winner from three standouts.

This ain’t no easy thing to win — the magazine gets between 5,000 and 6,000 entries per week. But Larry Wood, a lawyer with the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago, recently found out that he won the magazine’s Caption Contest for, yes, the third time. Click here for Wood’s winning entry, and here for the Chicago Trib story on Wood’s success. In an nushell: the cartoon (pictured), shows “a starlet being interviewed on a talk-show set behind prison bars.” Wood’s winning caption: “Both the movie and I will be released this summer.”

According to the Trib, Wood, who specializes on housing-law issues at the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago, says he comes to work on Mondays, has a look at the new, captionless cartoon, and ponders it for 10 minutes or so. If something good comes to him, he’ll enter it.

He thinks his winning entries have been solid but not amazing: For people approaching a panhandling dolphin (#92): “If he’s so damn intelligent, let him get a job.” For the first cartoon in color, cows talking about a bull smashing through a wall where there’s a red drape (#123): “You should be happy. How many husbands even notice window treatments?”

For all his efforts — and success — his showings are rather modest. The New Yorker’s prize to the winner is simply a signed print of the cartoon. “The only original art I own,” Wood told the Trib, are the signed prints he’s won that hang in his home’s entry, by the coat closet. “You see the cartoons before you see any pictures of my kids or my wife,” says Wood. “I should probably do something about that.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on June 02, 2009 (boomark / email).