The CartoonStock Cartoon Caption Contest No. 209

Another monthly contest already? The CartoonStock Caption Contest number 209 is set in a laboratory where an ape is perhaps doomscrolling on his cell phone while a pair of researchers looks on. The man in the lab coat is speaking. The cartoonist is Kaamran Hafeez. 

The monthly cash prize contest has new rules which I seem compelled to repeat: Five dollars will still buy up to three entries but now three additional dollars can optionally buy a fourth entry, and so on and so forth. Real cash prizes are fifty percent of the total prize pool (previously $500, but more this month) for first place and ten percent of the prize pool (previously $100) for each of five runners up. As of this writing, I've put $270 into the first fifty-four pay-to-play contests and this fifty-fifth challenge brings my total cash outlay up to $275. Having achieved runner-up status with three previous cash prize entries, I've collected $300 from CartoonStock, so I'm still playing with the house's money, at least for the time being. Because the contest is no longer subsidized by cash from the vast coffers of CartoonStock, the contest's odds should now be just a little less favorable, I think. The prize pool, as I prepared my captions in the final hour before the deadline—when else would I enter?—was, as I've already hinted, securely above that old thousand dollar level.

So here is my big chance to redeem myself after last month's poor showing. My three entries are shown above the break. There is a fourth caption which is somewhat meta. I considered paying another $3 to put it out there, but then I thought better of it.

"As our new lab assistant, it will be your job to take it away from him."
"We can't get him off Truth Social."
"Frankly, we have no idea what Caesar is up to."
* * *
"I wish he had joined that barbershop quartet instead."

I'm afraid that last caption doesn't stand on its own. It should be an easily-recognized reference to The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest #1002 which had its deadline on Monday night. If you know, you know. I saved my $3 because he's an ape, not a monkey.

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