What's up with the CartoonStock Caption Contest number 210? It features a girl talking to a firefighter while an elephant sits in a tree. That's what's up. The cartoonist is Rusty Epstein. He's new to the contest and new to the blog.
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 was the fifty percent) 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 $275 into the first fifty-five pay-to-play contests and this fifty-sixth challenge brings my total cash outlay up to $280. So far I haven't purchased any of the new $3 entries. 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, unless $3 entries are being purchased in bulk by the caption-impaired. The prize pool, as I prepared my captions in the 9:00 hour before the deadline, was already pushing up against that old thousand dollar level.
So here is my big chance to redeem myself after last month's weak showing. My three entries are shown below.
"Could you check under him for the cat?" "Guess what happened to the swing." "The one thing he can't remember is how he got up there."
September 27, 2026 Update: The Winner
None of my captions made any of the lists in the judging video.
