"Punch Is A Opera. A 'Uproar' We Calls It." (In which I sort of get Punch and Judy)

Presenting Percy Press' last stand, and some early hell from the Brothers Quay.

 Now this is a find! Punch and Judy: Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy. It's only as the credits rolled I learnt it contains the last ever performance given by Percy Press Senior "the uncrowned King of Punch & Judy Men". He died when I was six, so there's a chance I saw him perform live as well, out in Covent Garden; the scene twenty-six minutes in where Joey has fun with the corpses of Punch's victims certainly rings a bell, and seems too virtuosic a piece of handiwork to be easily imitated. It also makes me giggle, which surprised me. Previously, like I assume most people, I had considered Punch and Judy entertaining only in the way bad taxidermy or collections of gas masks were entertaining, but Press' act here isn't just macabre. The timing with which he wields his puppets, punctuating their manic outbursts with sudden moments of tense stillness, recalls the cartoons of Tex Avery or Chuck Jones. And now I think of it, pretending you're too stupid to put your head into a noose so you can ask the hangman to demonstrate is exactly the kind of stunt Bugs Bunny would pull, except Bugs wouldn't batter his wife and child to death first.

  I saw these in a Punch and Judy exhibition at the Aberdeen Maritime Musuem last year. In addition to the tradional policeman, beadle, ghost, doctor, "Joey", and devil, some modern shows add a health-and-safety officer. This is true.

 As well as a record of Press' act you can also see him performing excerpts from an interview with an early "Punchman" from 1850, in addition to some pretty queasy narration from Punch himself performed by Joe Melia - I didn't like that at all, and nor will you, be warned - a full account from 1827 of the first Punch and Judy show ever documented, complete with cracking, boss-eyed illustrations by George Cruickshank...

You can see more here.

... and, perhaps most excitingly of all, early but readily identifiable animation from surrealism's foremost haunted doll wranglers, the Brothers Quay, including their accompaniment to the opera Punch and Judy by Harrison Birtwhistle. It's altogether a beautifully packed little history.

Evidence of a pre-Commedia Punch forerunner from the Roman du bon roi Alexandre Manuscript by Jehan de Grise, France 1344. 

 I was resarching Punch and Judy because, having finally put Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein to bed, I still had clowns versus monsters on the brain. "Joey" Grimaldi himself of course was chased offstage by a giant mutant vegetable here. Bugs Bunny bested monsters and witches and martians. And Punch faced off against a giant crocodile most famously, but also ghosts, the devil, and reviled seventeenth century celebrity executioner Jack Ketch. Like a cartoon his woodenness made him indestrucable, but again, now I think about it, maybe the most pertinent parallel to draw is not with cartoons but with SPOILERS FOR ONCE UPON A TIME IN LOS ANGELES: Bradd Pitt's wife-murderer taking down the Manson family END OF SPOILERS. Quentin Tarantino has gone on record to say how influential he found Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, but actually it's his work we go to these days for our Punch and Judy shows. The code there's the same: violent people are monsters, but violence is fun.

Florence hasn't quite got her thwack down yet, and the audience reacts accordingly. You can't go wrong with a crocodile though.