The theater owed its name to Guignol, which was a traditional Lyonnaise puppet character, joining political commentary with the style of Punch and Judy.

He interviewed everyone — beggars, street-entertainers ( such as Punch and Judy men ), market traders, prostitutes, labourers, sweatshop workers, even down to the " mudlarks " who searched the stinking mud on the banks of the River Thames for wood, metal, rope and coal from passing ships, and the " pure-finders " who gathered dog faeces to sell to tanners.

Early in his career he worked as an illustrator for magazines like the Boy's Own Paper and Judy, drew comic strips, including the Sherlock Holmes parody " Chubb-Lock Homes " for Comic Cuts, and wrote articles for Punch under the pseudonym " W. Bird ".

* The Punch and Judy Murders, a book, also published under the title The Magic Lantern Murders

More recently Sir Harrison Birtwistle has emerged as one of Britain's most significant contemporary composers from his first opera Punch and Judy to his most recent critical success in The Minotaur.

A traditional Punch and Judy booth, at Swanage, Dorset

Punch and Judy is a traditional, popular puppet show featuring Mr. Punch and his wife, Judy.

The Punch and Judy show has roots in the 16th-century Italian commedia dell ' arte.

In the British Punch and Judy show, Punch wears a brightly colored jester's motley and sugarloaf hat with a tassel.

So important is Punch's signature sound that it is a matter of some controversy within Punch and Judy circles as to whether a " non-swazzled " show can be considered a true Punch and Judy Show.

A Punch and Judy show attracts a family audience

The mobile puppet booth of the late 18th-and early 19th-century Punch and Judy glove-puppet show was originally covered in checked bed ticking or whatever inexpensive cloth might come to hand.

The term " pleased as Punch " is derived from Punch and Judy ; specifically, Mr. Punch's characteristic sense of gleeful self-satisfaction.

" Modern British performances of Punch and Judy are no longer exclusively the traditional seaside children's entertainments they had become.

Punch and Judy, taken in Islington.

The characters in a Punch and Judy show are not fixed as in a Shakespeare play, for instance.

Along with Punch and Judy, the cast of characters usually includes their baby, a hungry crocodile, a clown, an officious policeman, and a prop string of sausages.

The full version of the song from Melbourne Punch, the fourth verse of which is pasted onto the urn

This is the fourth verse of a song-lyric published in Melbourne Punch on 1 February 1883:

Tenniel is most noted for two major accomplishments: he was the principal political cartoonist for England ’ s Punch magazine for over 50 years, and he was the artist who illustrated Lewis Carroll ’ s Alice ’ s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.

When examined separately from the book illustrations he did over time, Tenniel ’ s work at Punch alone, expressing decades of editorial viewpoints, often controversial and socially sensitive, was created to ultimately echo the voices of the British public, and is in itself massive.

On 27 February 1914, two days after his death, the Daily Graphic recalled Tenniel: " He had an influence on the political feeling of this time which is hardly measurable … While Tenniel was drawing them ( his subjects ), we always looked to the Punch cartoon to crystallize the national and international situation, and the popular feeling about it — and never looked in vain.

The figure who later became Mr. Punch made his first recorded appearance in England on 9 May 1662, which is traditionally reckoned as Punch's UK birthday.

There is no one definitive " story " of Punch and Judy.

" This was elaborated by George Speaight in his Punch & Judy: A History ( 1970 ), who explained that the plotline " is like a story compiled in a parlour game of Consequences ... the show should, indeed, not be regarded as a story at all but a succession of encounters.

" The most recent academic work, Punch & Judy: History, Tradition and Meaning by Robert Leach ( 1985 ), makes it clear that " the story is a conceptual entity, not a set text: the means of telling it, therefore, are always variable.

Much emphasis is often placed on the first printed script of Punch and Judy ( 1828 ).

It is rare for Punch to hit his baby these days, but he may well sit on it in a failed attempt to " babysit ", or drop it, or even let it go through a sausage machine.

A ghost might then appear and give Mr. Punch a fright before it too is chased off with a slapstick.

It is these set piece encounters or " routines " which are used by performers to construct their own Punch and Judy shows.

While the Victorian version of the show drew on the morality of its day, the Punch & Judy College of Professors considers that the 20th-and 21st-century versions of the tale have evolved into something more akin to a primitive version of The Simpsons, in which a bizarre family is used as vehicle for grotesque visual comedy and a sideways look at contemporary society.

While censorious political correctness threatened Punch and Judy performances in the UK and other English speaking countries for a time, the show is having one of its cyclical recurrences and can now be seen not only in England, Wales, and Ireland, but also in Canada, the United States ( including Puerto Rico ), Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

Looking back on this period ( in 1926 ) Milne observed that when he told his agent that he was going to write a detective story, he was told that what the country wanted from a " Punch humorist " was a humorous story ; when two years later he said he was writing nursery rhymes, his agent and publisher were convinced he should write another detective story ; and after another two years he was being told that writing a detective story would be in the worst of taste given the demand for children's books.

Because his task was to construct the wilful choices of his Punch editors, who probably took their cue from The Times and would have felt the suggestions of political tensions from Parliament as well, Tenniel ’ s work, as was its design, could be scathing in effect.

His drawing of ' An unequal match ', published in Punch on 8 October 1881, depicted a police officer fighting a criminal with only a ' baton ' for protection, trying to put a point across to the public that policing methods needed to be changed.

Bismarck was discarded (" dropping the pilot " in the words of the famous Punch cartoon ), promoted to the rank of " Colonel-General with the Dignity of Field Marshal " ( so-called because the German Army did not appoint full Field Marshals in peacetime ) and given a new title, Duke of Lauenburg, which he joked would be useful when travelling incognito.

In less squeamish times a hangman would arrive to punish Mr. Punch, only to himself be tricked into sticking his head in the noose.

A visit to a Punch and Judy Festival at Punch's " birthplace " in London's Covent Garden will reveal a whole variety of changes that are rung by puppeteers from this basic material and although scripts have been published at different times since the early 19th century, none can be claimed as being the definitive traditional script of Punch and Judy.

Other characters that had to incur the wrath of Punch varied depending on the punchman, but the most common were the foreigner, the blind man, the publican, the constable, and the devil, however the most interesting and developed relationship continued to be that of Punch and Judy themselves ( Crone 1058 ).

A transcript of a typical Punch and Judy show in London of the 1840s can be found in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor.

The words attributed to Occam, entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem ( entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity ), are absent in his extant works ; this particular phrasing owes more to John Punch.

The petition O ' Connor presented to Parliament was claimed to have only 1, 957, 496 signatures – far short of the 5, 706, 000 he had stated and many of which were discovered to be forgeries ( some of the false signatories included Queen Victoria, Mr Punch and ' Pugnose ').

Between 1962 and 1966, Robinson would also be one of the in-demand songwriters and producers for Motown, penning several hit singles such as " The One Who Really Loves You ", " You Beat Me to the Punch " and " My Guy " for Mary Wells, " The Way You Do The Things You Do ", " My Girl ", " Since I Lost My Baby " and " Get Ready " for The Temptations, " When I'm Gone " and " Operator " for Brenda Holloway, " Don't Mess With Bill ", " The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game " and " My Baby Must Be a Magician " for The Marvelettes and " I'll Be Doggone " and " Ain't That Peculiar " for Marvin Gaye.

The explicit violence of his first opera Punch and Judy – in which the murder of Judy by her husband is much more shocking when performed live on stage than by glove puppets in the classic British seaside entertainment – can easily be misinterpreted as a clue to the intention of his abstract music.

Chandler wrote of Milne's novel, " It is an agreeable book, light, amusing in the Punch style, written with a deceptive smoothness that is not as easy as it looks [...] Yet, however light in texture the story may be, it is offered as a problem of logic and deduction.

Also common include request for new members to get a DC Punch from the one of the Damage Controlmen who in turn hit them, be requested to calibrate the radar by being wrapped in tin foil and made to walk around the forecastle and stand in various poses, or to look for the mail buoy because the captain is expecting an important letter or package, who are subsequently reprimanded for missing the non-existent buoy during their watch.

Newly-drafted producer / director Glyn Edwards managed to retain this vital, messy element by drawing on his experience as a Punch & Judy puppeteer to create a ' villain ' character called ' The Phantom Flan Flinger ', who would be the black-clad masked nemesis of the presenting team, and the main instigator of pie-throwing chaos.

They are considered to be part of the " Suffolk Trinity " with Suffolk sheep and Suffolk Punch heavy horses.

Ainsworth issued an advertisement saying that there would be contributors of " high rank ", which caused Thackeray to attack Ainsworth in Punch for favouring the nobility.