Brilliance... Genius... Inspiring... are not some of the words used to describe the ongoing social experiment called captioning, also known as capping.

Capping? What’s that? Capping is an online joke-writing slam. It’s bad TV made relevant by the information superhighway. It’s like writing WASH ME on a dust-covered car. But at its most basic, capping is simply the art of making up something funny to say about a picture.

How it works. You open a web page in your browser and see a picture. You type something funny about the picture into a field, and post it. You can then see your caption, as well as those by other contributors, on a gallery page. It’s that simple.

Where. There a number of places on the World Wide Web where capping can be found, but it began at Caption This, inspired by the cult (not in the bad way) TV program Mystery Science Theater 3000 and located at the Sci-Fi Channel website. CT was distinctive from other online capping sites in that the picture updated automatically, and was unmoderated. Capping became an ongoing competition among the players to impress and one-up each other, and even build upon one another’s caps in chains of wide-ranging free association.

Just about anything was fair game. Movies, music, sex, politics, art, religion--all these subjects and more peacefully coexisted in the CT gallery. And on rare occasions someone steps over the line of good taste, the offender is either ignored or flamed mercilessly. In either case they soon departed. Scifi.com took down its CT page in mid-2004, and Invention Situations, a noncommercial project, arose to replace it.

At 3:00 a.m. EDT on July 21, 2007, after three years as the premier capping site, Invention Situations ceased live capping operations. Its Wasting Precious Time screengrab-based storywriting program continues.

Today, Hipsoda Industries and Glitter's Cap-Page Board are the primary capping websites.

A word about archives. One of the features of capping is that the gallery only holds a limited number of captions at a time; new captions bump the old ones into oblivion, because archives aren't kept. But this doesn’t stop players from saving their favorites. Webrings of sites containing galleries of archived captions can be found here, and here. The Kinetic website has galleries too, listed in the Research Index.

So why not give capping a try? All you need to do to get started is to go to Invention Situations and make up a handle. A handle is your onscreen name, like a fighter pilot’s callsign. Don’t pick anything you wouldn’t want to be associated with for the rest of your life. For example, in Top Gun, Tom Cruise’s callsign was "Maverick". Why he would name himself after an ugly 1970s Ford car I have no idea, but the consequences have dogged him ever since. Stick with your handle, and don't use someone else's; it's an honor system. If a good caption occurs to you, enter it and click Submit. Rinse, and repeat. Enjoy!