Local wag plays name that 'toon

None of the local winners are comics. Finalist Lou Rubino says his own children don't think he's that funny.

But at some point during the past year, while lounging on the couch, lying sick in bed, or perusing The New Yorker magazine's website, comedic inspiration of the highest order struck them all. They sent off their gems to the magazine's weekly cartoon caption contest.

Three of them won. And Rubino, an executive recruiter from Burlington, has reached the finals in a recent round of the contest for which the winner will be announced tomorrow.

Now, music librarian Andrew Wilson of Ayer has a standing offer to write for a greeting card company. Fifth-grade teacher Miriam Steinberg of Cambridge gets congratulated by her students' parents. Sarah Bell, a fund-raising assistant, has strangers recognize her name months after it appeared in the magazine.

''My friend's uncle was joking I should just go around captioning things in the house," said Bell, 23, of Cambridge.

''People who are die-hard New Yorker readers thought it was really great," she said. ''It was just fun to see someone they knew win. Like my grandmother. But people didn't look at me like I was any smarter. My friends probably know better."

Famous for its erudite and clever cartoons, The New Yorker let readers join in the fun by introducing the caption contest a year ago. A cartoon depicting an odd or impossible scenario -- a business meeting aboard a subway train, a minotaur sipping martinis at a bar -- appears on the last page of the weekly magazine. It's up to readers to come up with a punch line.

As many as 8,000 captions are sent in each week. The magazine's staff, including cartoon editor Bob Mankoff and editor in chief David Remnick, choose three finalists. Readers determine the eventual winner by popular vote.

Boston has flexed its creative muscle in the inaugural year of the contest, with three winners. And Rubino could make it four.

In the contest Rubino entered, the cartoon features a woman speaking with her lover in bed. The twist? Her lover is a huge snow globe with a snowman inside.

To come up with a quirky caption, Rubino says he had to create a quirky back story to explain the cartoon. The two weren't just lovers; they were adulterous.

Then he took it a step further. Who is the woman cheating on? Another snow globe, of course.

In his caption entry, the woman says: ''I think the Manhattan skyline is getting suspicious."

Will Rubino win? He readily admits his competition is tough. ''I just wish we could talk about something other than global warming," a caption submitted by reader Don Christensen of Bend, Ore., is pretty good.

Then again, none of Boston's caption champions figured they would win. Bell, Wilson, and Steinberg had never submitted an entry before or had entered any comedic writing contest, for that matter.

And while some contestants agonize for hours or days over their entries, Boston's winners say they came up with their captions almost instantly.

Steinberg, a teacher at Brighton's Conservatory Lab Charter School, was sick in bed in her Cambridge apartment when she flipped to the contest last April.

''I thought: 'That's it. How could there possibly be another answer for this one?' " she recalled.

Bell said she was just trying to write something that would make her friend, a fellow New Yorker reader, laugh. ''We live in different cities, so it was kind of fun to think of a caption and see what the other person comes up with," she said.

Wilson, a string bass player who works at Harvard University's Loeb Music Library, said he had forgotten about the contest by the time a New Yorker intern called him to let him know he was a finalist.

''He actually had to remind me I had entered," Wilson said. He won for a caption for a November cartoon in which a nebbishy-looking businessman hails a savage barbarian on a horse. A pair of villagers are in the background, whispering to each other. ''Dibs on the briefcase," his caption reads.

Morbid humor? Sure. But Wilson says he was going for something a bit smarter, something co-workers from ''The Office" might crack if their boss was about to get his comeuppance.

Cartoon editor Mankoff said the caption, in addition to being funny, was elegant in its diction and tone.

''There were a lot of ones about the briefcase," he said. '' 'Dibs' was funny. Look how short that is. It's four words; that's sort of nice."

Steinberg's cartoon was of a badly beaten man crawling on the ground toward an ''Emergency Hotline" phone bank. A rather compassionless-looking woman is leaning over to speak to him.

''Neither the time nor the place, Doug!" reads Steinberg's entry.

''Again, really nicely phrased," said Mankoff. ''You understand the whole back story. And then, of course, there's the correct choice of 'Doug.' You wanted a simple name, a one-syllable name. You definitely wouldn't want Stephen, you know? It sort of has that final little thing that ends that caption. Doug."

Bell's cartoon was of a pair of businessmen -- one of them a wolf in a suit and tie -- walking down the street. The wolf appeared to be grumbling about something.

''Oh, sure, they find one secretary in a pool of her own blood, and everybody wants to blame the werewolf," wrote Bell.

Many entrants played with a werewolf theme in their submissions, but no one nailed the tone quite like Bell, Mankoff said.

''We thought it sort of had a bouncy line," he said. ''I think it was strange and funny, which is usually a category we're looking for."

Readers love the contest because they get the chance to impress the magazine's editors with their wit, as opposed to the other way around, Mankoff says. But in the end, he stressed, it's still the readers who decide the winner.

''Just like American Idol," he said. ''And then, of course, they go on to fame and glory and no money at all."

Indeed, as Mankoff muses, the contest is really just for fun. And the winners clearly know that.

Bell says she's hung her prize, an autographed print of the cartoon signed by artist Tom Cheney, on her bedroom wall ''and hired someone to stand security."

Wilson got a random invitation from a California company to write greeting card sentiments for $50 each. ''My ship has come in!" he joked.

Steinberg says it's just cool to be asked about the contest at parties by envious fellow Cantabrigians.

Rubino has reaped perhaps the greatest reward for getting his name in print. A comedic authority no less than The New Yorker agrees that he really is funny.

''Both my sons always say to me, 'Dad, you have no sense of humor,' " Rubino said. ''I rubbed it in a nice way."