Welcome to the 2026 edition of the Lyttle Lytton Contest.  This year I want to start off with the runner-up.  Not only is it unusually good, but it was submit­ted in July, early enough in the cycle that I spent almost a full year thinking it was likely to be the winning entry:

There is a lot of wonderful badness packed into those 187 characters!  The phrase “fatal assassination” is redundant, and doesn’t really apply unless the unnamed wife is a person of prominence.  Sadness has no color, although I suppose it is associated with the color blue, suggesting that Hiroshi here is crying Windex.  The verbs “rip” and “sprint” are too vigorous for the context.  The character’s cheeks probably shouldn’t be rosy, and it is unclear how the cruelty of the earth actually manifests in the scene.  It’s quite a tour de force!  And yet… though it does fit within the contest’s 200-character limit, it’s not quite in keeping with the contest’s spirit.  I count five prepositional phrases, an introductory dependent clause, and a compound predicate.  Ideal for the (now defunct) Bulwer-Lytton Contest!  But my little spinoff is looking for a bit more punch.  So when I finally had the full set of entries to evaluate, I had to call this one a very close second, and give the win to an entry that checked in at only seventy characters:

One of the reasons I have continued to run this contest for more than a quar­ter of a century now is that I’m still interested in the question of what makes writing funny, and every year I get a batch of new case studies that prompt new observations.  Whether something is funny is answered empirically⁠—in this case, the entry showed up in my inbox and I immediately knew it would be at least an honorable mention.  But why?  One of the main reasons was the reference to Pokémon Go, but again, why did I find that funny?  A common explanation for laughter is that it is caused by a sort of short-circuit in the brain.  Consider John F. Kennedy’s rule-of-three joke in 1962: “But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, thirty-five years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?”  He sets a pattern by naming two historic feats, then a third that doesn’t fit that pattern.  The idea is that the listeners will (subcon­sciously) think, “Huh? But playing a football game isn’t a historic feat! He’s equating Rice beating Texas to a death-defying test of human capability!”, and the incongruity makes them laugh.  (The fact that Kennedy delivered this speech at Rice University meant that the audience also laughed out of the pleasures of recognition and inclusion, but I will refrain from going off on that tangent.)  An even more relevant example is the famous Mitch Hedberg joke: “I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to too.”  In this case the first two statements don’t establish a pattern, but rather seem to contradict each other, so the short-circuit happens that much sooner.  That is, the first statement seems to imply that the speaker no longer uses drugs (as “used to” generally indicates formerly habitual behavior that has now stopped), so for him to then say that he still does seems like an incompatible follow-up⁠—but then the punchline, “but I used to too”, implicitly asserts that, no, the phrase “used to” does not necessarily mean that the habitual behavior of the past is different from the habitual behavior of the present.  And part of what makes the joke so effective is that the truth or falsity of that implicit assertion is not actually all that clear!  Can you say that you used to do drugs if you still do?  It’s not nor­mal to say that, but is it wrong?  In the absence of an Académie Anglaise, who’s to say?

The reason this example seems more relevant to me is that I think I liked
this year’s winner so much in large part because it left me struggling with a couple of similarly unresolved questions.  One is: is it really all that silly to de­scribe mid-2016 as “the summer of Pokémon Go”?  On the one hand, it seems like the answer is actually no⁠—Pokémon Go was a gigantic craze, to the point that Yelp actually added a “Pokéstop nearby” filter to its listings.  But on the other hand, it was such a flash in the pan that only ten years later it counts as an amusingly obscure reference.  And it seems to lack the gravitas to serve as a historical marker⁠—it was a game that sent people wandering around town pointing their phone cameras at crosswalks and dumpsters, hoping that their screens would show a cartoon monster that wasn’t actually there.  (As op­posed to the cartoon monsters that were actually there, I guess.)  And then the other question is what to make of the wordplay.  Initially it read to me like a classic Lyttle Lytton formula, in which the imaginary author is trying to be clever, but the result is strained in a way that the imaginary author did not intend (but the real author did).  There are some historical parallels here!  If Hillary Clinton hadn’t made young voters cringe by telling them to “Pokémon Go to the polls”, we might be living in a very different world right now.  But then I started to second-guess my original reading.  Does this read more as a bad opening to a serious novel or as a great opening to a comedic one?

I say this almost every year, but if your entry reads like a deliberate joke, complete with punchline, it is highly unlikely to be selected.  And yet every year my Lyttle Lytton folder ends up packed with sentences like this: “When I explained to my wife why I hadn’t come home the night before, she said I was full of shit, and truth be told I had not in fact had a bowel movement in some time.”  This imaginary author clearly engineered the sentence to pro­duce the mental short-circuit that makes us laugh, encouraging us to initially read the key phrase as a metaphorical idiom but then be forced to re-interpret it as literal.  You can argue that the entry is some kind of Ricky Gervais meta-comedy in which the real joke is that the ostensible joke is not good.  Meh.  I don’t buy it.  But the intentionality behind the Pokémon Go sentence seems a lot less clear-cut to me.  That’s why I said the Mitch Hedberg example seemed more relevant to me: that joke leaves the listener with a permanent mental short-circuit (“Can you say that? Yes? No? Maybe? Aggh!”), and, for me at least, so does this one.  Is it actually bad?  Seems bad!  Silly reference!  Awk­ward play on words!  And yet if I picked up a novel and this were the first sentence, would I want to keep reading?  Absolutely!  So if you like your Lyttle Lytton winners to be unambiguously bad, go with the Maxwell Alexander Johnson entry.  But I’m going with the one by Shena Parsons.  A lot of it comes down to the fact that, unlike so many entries, including a lot of honorable mentions every year, this year’s winner actually sounds like the first sentence of a novel.  Not only does it have the right ring to it, but it establishes the main problem the protagonist must overcome, a life that has stalled out.  It does so in a way that’s a tad melodramatic.  And melodrama makes for an odd mix with Pikachu and Jigglypuff.  Does that odd mix make it bad or brilliant?  I still don’t know.

Okay, on to the honorable mentions!  In no particular order…

Another entry that starts by stating the year.  The Lyttle Lytton Universe certainly has developed a convoluted timeline over the years:

• 1353: Aftermath of Black Death
  
• 1706: Extrusion of Benjamin Franklin
  
• 1993: Aftermath of destruction of civilization by acid rain
  
• 1995: Soccer teams come to town
  
• 1996: Innocent man is murdered
  
• 2001: 9/11
  
• 2009: Turbulence in global apparel industry
  
• 2016: Pokémon Go
  
• 2026: Mega-Quake destroys Neo-Tokyo
  
• 2029: Pager blares incessantly
  
• 2030: U.S./Mexico border is gone
  
• 2347: World abounds with nuclear alacrity
  
• 3010: Triumph of the potatoes
  

As for the comedic premise of the entry: as an English teacher, I can attest that it is a heck of a thing to come across this euphemism in a student’s essay and explain, “This isn’t social media⁠—you can use the word ‘killed’”, only for the student to express discomfort with that (!), having internalized from the censorship algorithms that writing “killed” crosses a line.  I’ve also seen late Zoomers be shocked to find the word “regarded” in a reading assignment, because apparently that has become a euphemism on social media for a Word That Must Not Be Written (which itself started out as a euphemism), and as the treadmill keeps on running, that euphemism has taken on some of the stigma of the forbidden word.

And on the topic of the unalive:

Turning from the unalive to the undead:

I was subjected to enough Slim-Fast commercials as a kid that I could not read this without hearing an announcer’s voice intoning, “Blood for breakfast, blood for lunch, and then a sensible dinner!”

And since, year after year, y’all can’t seem to get enough of those kooky dark-past’d vampires:

In the entry above the arrows are metaphorical but the teeth are literal; then we have this one:

I don’t know what I would have made of this entry a few years ago, but in 2026, my immediate reaction was, “Her breasts were teeth? Dang, that’s a really unfortunate Stable Diffusion result.”

We’ve seen this gimmick before⁠—i.e., comparing something to a represen­tation of itself⁠—and in fact I get a few such entries every year.  But this is a particularly good one, because it defuses the way I hear people defend this practice in real life.  Consider:

Comparison: (watching the World Trade Center collapse) “Whoa! This is like a disaster movie!”

Sarcastic riposte: “So… an actual disaster is like a cinematic represen­tation of a disaster?”

Defender’s reply: “But people rarely see such disasters in real life. The point is precisely that this sight seems like it belongs to the unreal realm of cinema.”

Or one even closer to this⁠—again, while this isn’t word for word, I’ve heard these sorts of conversations:

Comparison: “He made a face like a smiley emoji⁠—⁠”

Sarcastic riposte: “So… he smiled?”

Defender’s reply: “Except there are many types of smiles, and the point seems to be that this didn’t seem like a natural one, but speci­fically like the artificial rictus that pops up on social media.”

But Megan Sanders’s entry seems safe from these defenders, because there is nothing about a thumbs-down emoji that distinguishes it from an actual thumbs down.  This really is comparing something to a representation of itself for no reason.  Hence, excellent entry.  I hereby form my hand into the shape of a thumbs-up emoji.

I like this one because it suggests an entire genre of stories in which competi­tions are based on the wrong criteria.  A Jeopardy! contestant training to hit the button the hardest, say, or an art show entrant vowing to apply the thick­est coat of paint.  Which swim team can drink the most pool water?  You could run this series out to as many volumes as you like.

And thus in Civilization IV his body can contribute to building the Parthenon while his cold gaze can contribute to building the Pyramids.

The twist is that by moving her face along with her eyes, she just failed her field sobriety test.

Her breasts were teeth.  Her eyes were hands.

When I was five years old, I came up with the following joke: “What did the dollar bill say to the Incredible Hulk? ‘Let’s be friends, we are both green.’”  I guess the natural follow-up is “What did the green-skinned protagonist say to the lifeless turtle? ‘I do not want to die.’” 

As I read this sentence, I realized I was now trapped in an even worse cage than society: an incorrectly punctuated novel.  There were quite a few entries that pulled this same trick of putting a semicolon where a different piece of punctuation is supposed to go, and we’ll actually see a few more of them further down this list of winners.  But on the topic of inappropriate punctuation:

This is one of those sentences that really seems like it works and yet doesn’t quite.  Like, yes, ChatGPT has come to be associated with em dashes.  Em dash­es could conceivably be viewed as phallic.  Large language models are associ­ated with data centers.  Data centers are infamous for using up a lot of water.  “Her sopping wet center” is a phrase that fits seamlessly into an erotic story.  (“Data center” doesn’t fit quite as well, but I suppose that there is sometimes some genetic information waiting therein.)  But, but… the chatbots aren’t using punctuation to penetrate the data centers… it just seems like a case of so close and yet so very, very far.

I guess this is as good a segue as any for this year’s batch of racy entries:

A similar deal to the one above.  Comparing the world to an oyster goes back to Shakespeare.  The phrase “woman’s pearl” is common enough in erotica to produce many pages of results in the search engines.  Oysters can have pearls.  It seems like this should work.  But making the oyster do double duty as a metaphor for the world and for Janet’s genitalia is too much to ask of a simple bivalve.

Of course, the Titan actually imploded rather than exploding.  I wonder what might make someone’s loins implode.  Maybe someone with teeth for breasts.

Pronouns with ambiguous antecedents notwithstanding, this is an example of antimetabole.  The sentence structure is, not the sexual position described.  I don’t know whether the sexual position described has a name.

More sapphic confusion:

A popular song of my youth maintained that learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all.  But those of a more religious bent would probably argue for this:

Wow, she had better luck getting eye contact from God than the earlier protagonist had getting some from Jean-Pierre.

Pass.  Isn’t that always the way?  You start with a sex potion and it looks like you’re in for some hot romantasy and then suddenly it’s all about feet.

I know there’s a double entendre here, but this one jumped out at me primar­ily because “avifauna were vocalizing” is an impressively stilted way to say that birds were singing.

Speaking of arousing protagonists:

I only like one of those two things!  Though this entry does make me wonder what fatal feminine pronouns would be.  She/hurrrgghk!, maybe?

I suppose that if the answer to “How many roads must a man walk down?” can be forty-two, the answer to “How deep is your love?” can be 33,000 feet.

Maybe this narrator would have had better luck if instead of Muhammad City he had HALO jumped into love.

For the most part this is stilted in a way similar but not identical to the “avi­fauna were vocalizing”⁠—that one was overly academic, while “hospitalizing accident” is just awkward.  Either way, though, the stilted phrasing nicely sets off the simple and gruesome “cut up like a peeled potato”.  And as long as we’re talking about starches:

Rain comes in sheets, and pasta comes in sheets, and yet the transitive prop­erty does not apply.  We’ve seen this sort of thing before⁠—the honey sentence from 2012 comes to mind, as does the butter sentence from 2019.  What sent me down a rabbit hole was that “lasagne” is plural, so I thought it was a word that only appeared on menus at Italian restaurants that offered many varie­ties of lasagna.  But apparently calling the baked dish “lasagna”, singular, is an American thing; in Commonwealth English it is called “lasagne” because it consists of a stack of multiple pasta sheets.  According to my database, this entry was submitted from Australia, so that would seem to explain that.  But then what’s up with this?

The box on the left is for the U.S. market, yet it is labeled “Lasagne”.  The box on the right is for the Italian market, and it contains multiple pasta sheets, yet it is labeled “Lasagna”.  Is it standard to use the singular in Italian?  No⁠—even in Italy, the boxes of long strands are not labeled “Spaghetto”.  This is more confusing than whatever is going on between Allison and Tina.

Some serendipity here⁠—this entry got cut off because it is exactly two hun­dred characters long as written.  But while I certainly wouldn’t want to see this become a trend, I feel like this one actually works better without a final punctuation mark.  It reads like a sports commentator hurriedly cutting off his reading of an ad because the action on the field has unexpectedly restarted.

That’s kind of a meta entry because the ad isn’t really part of the story.  Here’s another, which looks less like the first line of a novel and more like part of the foreword:

This is an idea that could only work once⁠—I’m surprised I haven’t received it before.  (Or maybe I have and I’m just not remembering.)  The thing that gets me about these land acknowledgments is that they generally only go back so far.  The ones I hear in my neck of the woods acknowledge the Ohlone speak­ers who lived here before the arrival of the Spanish in the eighteenth century, but we never hear about the Hokan speakers those Ohlone speakers displaced when they migrated in from the Central Valley.  Sequent occupancy has a little bit more complexity to it than the “traditional homeland” formulas tend to acknowledge!

One nice thing about the French revolutionary calendar is that you don’t need a poem to remind you how many days each month hath, because they all have thirty.  The downside is that that you need a much longer poem to remind you which day is the day of the cauliflower and which day is the day of the goat and whatnot.

And while the above entry is a bit of a wtf, I always look forward to the entry each year that most makes me go, “What, whut?”, and this year that entry is this:

The runner-up of the very first edition of this contest would have suggested a very different novel if the cosmonauts had seen an untethered angel on fire.  An angel named Todd.

All right, on to the found division!  This year’s winner is:

Ben, the thing about rapid-fire rounds is that by definition they don’t get fired one at a time.  Do you also think that eye drops are dispensed by a hose?

Many entrants offered up selections from this notorious memoir by a journal­ist with whom Robert Kennedy Jr. had an extramarital relationship.  I picked this one because “From his mouth the bullet theoretical launched the bullet possible” seemed to best exemplify the fact that no matter how tortured a phrasing might be, there’s bound to be an actual human out there, maybe even someone who makes a living by stringing words together, who will look at it and pat herself on the back for composing such artful prose.

Apparently this is 2 Kings 2:23-24.  It reads to me as very close to the 2008 winner in the original division: Because they had not repented, the angel stabbed the unrepentant couple thirteen times, with its sword.  We not only have the retribution fantasy, but even the use of an oddly specific num­ber.  The main difference is that the author of the Lyttle Lytton winner saw angels where the Deuteronomistic historians saw comrades.  Wait, no, not comrades.  Bears.  I meant bears.

This involved widening my eyes, which were in said face intrinsically.

This seemed like a companion piece to the Jordan Peterson entry from 2018 that explained that our eyes are always pointing at things we are interested in looking at.

I picked this one just to showcase that life imitates art: this sentence makes almost exactly the same mistake as our 2012 winner, as once again we have an eye taking in sounds.  Except this time it wasn’t written by someone entering a bad writing contest.

Another blast from the past:

The very limbs!  Those selfsame ones!  …is what I wrote in 2010 when another found entry contained the exact same phrase.  I look forward to more poignant irony about limb loss in 2042.

Finally, we have the computer-generated division:

I hadn’t heard of this one, so I looked it up.  “Claude is a series of large langu­age models developed by American software company Anthropic,” Wikipedia reported.  I also see that the U.S. government deemed it a security risk.  I as­sume that this is because of its unpatriotic spelling.  If you ask it what to make for dinner it probably suggests “lasagne”.

And then we have our winner:

I don’t know how you prompt for a sentence that is plausible but slightly off, but that’s what we have here.  In addition to the suggestion that the trauma of war has shattered the gaiety of the young, we have a pretty standard meta­phor with doors representing life’s opportunities.  Except, y’know, we don’t really measure doors by their brightness.  You don’t go to the home improve­ment store and pick up a door of solid mahoghany with keyless entry and a rating of six hundred lumens.

Other than these two, the LLMs didn’t really come up with much this year, and I think I’m going to fold the generated entries back into the found divi­sion.  The technology has evolved to the point that it’s no longer producing the sort of kooky sentences it did five years ago, while it hasn’t yet evolved to the point that it’s really competing with human entrants.  Then again, for all I know “Shena Parsons” might be the latest release by Deepseek.

And that wraps it up for the 2026 edition of the Lyttle Lytton Contest.  I pretty much always have a note here about how different entries would have made the list of winners on different days, and to please try again if your entry wasn’t selected, etc.  But this year I really need to emphasize that.  We’ve heard a lot over the past few years about the “enshittification” of much of the Internet.  And the way that many of its basic elements just don’t function as well as they used to did affect Lyttle Lytton in 2026.  When I first started this contest in 2001, I just had entrants email me their submissions.  I switched to an entry form when the length limit changed from thirty-three words to two hundred characters, but that still meant little more than sanitizing the input, reformatting it a bit, and then emailing it to the same address where I used to accept the entries directly.  But this year that stopped working.  I had been getting an awful lot of bot-generated spam entries, and then one day that sud­denly stopped⁠—but it wasn’t for a couple of weeks that I discovered that some very enthusiastic filters were throwing away legitimate entries along with the spam.  I was able to recover most of them, but not all.  I hoped that switching to a database would solve the problem, but the same thing ended up happen­ing: my logs showed a lot more submissions than had actually been recorded.  BlockMi was just going crazy, I guess.  Thus, for the 2027 contest, which is now underway, I’ve tweaked the entry form slightly so that, at the very least, entrants should be able to see if their submissions have been lost.  And if you think you came up with something great for the 2026 contest, trying it again in 2027 may not actually be a waste of a submission.

And so, as I prepare to exfil via helo, let me conclude by thanking all the 2026 entrants!  Thanks also to everyone who helps spread the word about this con­test, and in particular to those who help support it via my Patreon account.  You are all both comrades and angels.