And so he has entered the magazine's carton caption headline 107 times -- "which puts him in five hundred and sixty-ninth place out of 502,416 unique entrants, who have submitted a total of 1,595,506 captions," the magazine reveals in a recent piece.

"It’s not that I think my cartoon captions are better than anyone else’s, although some weeks, understandably, I do,'' Ebert wrote two years ago in the Sun Times. "It’s that just once I want to see one of my damn captions in the magazine that publishes the best cartoons in the world. Is that too much to ask?"

Apparently, the answer is no.

The granddaddy of America's literary magazines finally rewards Ebert with a caption win in a cartoon showing a lost couple (presumably) looking for their car in a section marked "F". The wife snipes, "I'm not going to say the word I'm thinking of."

It's cute if a little obvious but doesn't come close to the cleverness of other captions he's submitted including the cheeky one above.

" Well, Roger Ebert certainly has the hang of it now,'' writes Robert Mankoff, the magazine's cartoon editor. "And I see he has entered contest No. 282, so stay tuned."

And now, the peanut balcony is closed.