Punch and Judy are iconic puppets. I have to admit I have always been curious about Punch and his play. You always see it off to the side in Victorian set films, and the people always seem like they are having a good laugh. This book is basically a repository all all the information author Ryan Howard has been able to find pertaining to Mr. Punch and friends. The book is divided into three parts: history of the art, biographical dictionary of the performers, and appendix with articles and scripts. I found the book to be thorough, informative, and fascinating. There is so much information that I could only read it in bits and pieces for there was so much to absorb. My only criticism would perhaps be that there could be more photographs. When reading the biographical section, I think it would have been particularly helpful, but perhaps they don't exist. Also, the focus of the book seemed more inclusive than just 19th Century America. It covered other centuries and frequently of Punch in Europe. I think a different title would be useful. ( )

As the title states, this is the history of Punch and Judy shows in Eastern American dime shows, museums and traveling acts.
The author is a professor of art and a puppet enthusiast, and the research he's done on the subject makes the word "exhaustive" seem like an understatement. He seems to have uncovered every newspaper article and billing featuring Punch and Judy from that time (the bibliography runs seven densely typed pages) and the book contains over 100 pages listing the names of what must be every American man to ever be involved in a Punch and Judy performance during this period. This is one reason why I don't think the book would do for the reader with just a casual interest in the subject- it's been organized and padded out as if every reader was a professor who is going to use it as a textbook. Which brings us to the problem of its lack of fun. Punch and Judy shows are loud and violent. Punch beats or kills nearly everyone who comes near him. He throws his baby off the stage for crying and gleefully kills the police officer who comes to arrest him. It's dark, anti-social humor and I expected something of a celebration of all that with this book, but none was there. I give the author credit for all the work that had to go into researching and near the back of the book are two scripts for Punch and Judy plays, which is great. ( )

There's something that happens often enough in schools that, even if it never happened to you, you've probably run across it more than once in your education. Namely students are given a project that they can, to a varying degree, define themselves. But upon proposing their project their instructor strongly advises they choose another subject. There can be many reasons for doing so, but the one that always seemed most common and defensible to me was when the student had selected a topic for which they would almost certainly have trouble finding research materials on. Sometimes the student is committed (or bullheaded) and barrels on inspite of advice and if the instructor was correct the result would invaribly be a thin, desperate attempt at literary stone soup.

That's what I was thinking as I worked my way through Punch and Judy. The orginal text makes up a scant 116 pages, but feels like a morbidly obese pamplet given the very limited depth of it's content. The author, with his apparently tragic lack of source material, tries to make do listing such dry and statistical facts as the names of performers, dates of shows, their venues and lists names of guests that would have been noteworthy in 19th century America (few of them remain so today). He pads his page count with quotes that rarely provide new information and entire chapters seem to have naught to do with Punch and Judy at all despite hopeful titles like "Punch and Judy in the Museum and the Circus". There is far more talk of freak shows in this chapter than puppetry, but it is justified with a hand wave as the author reminds us that often Punch shows existed along side freak shows. But then in the face of such obvious reaching he finds even more astounding levels of tenuousness in name-dropping such apparently irrelevent university darlings as colonialism, capitalism, queer theory and the uncanny. This is not to say that a relationship could not be made here, at least metaphorically, but it is clear that Howard does not have the historical resources to make any compelling argument regarding these possible connections.

Tragically, at some point the author says, "my thesis is X", and even though the book had barely started I knew this was I problem. Not because there's something wrong with explicitly stating your thesis, but because I already knew that by the end of the book I would not know his thesis anymore because aside from that one sentence there really wasn't any thesis established within the writing. Not unless his thesis was "a collection of anything I can scrape together with some sort of connection to Punch", but even given the accuracy of that possible thesis I'm about 99% sure the thesis in that one sentence sounded a good bit less desperate and a good bit more beyond the abilities (or at the very least the resources) of the author.

It does seem like Punch and Judy would have been a fun and culturally significant show, and I wish I could know more about it. Sadly reading this book leaves me thinking that in addition to not being able to enjoy live Punch and Judy a denizen of the 21th century I won't really be able to find any information of much worth on it either. ( )

This is a highly specialized book, focusing on the very narrow historical topic of Punch and Judy shows, including their typical makeup, the places they were put on, and the people who were most famous for performing them. The second portion of the book takes the form of a reference work, including an autobiographical dictionary with entries dedicated to prominent Punch "professors" (the book explains how this term came to be used to refer to Punch puppeteers.) Most readers will find this unhelpful; however, if you are studying this or a related topic, you will likely find it well researched and thorough.

That having been said, I was surprised at how readable the essays that comprise the first half of the book ended up being for me, a reader with very little knowledge of Punch and Judy. This is an interesting look at the way a niche art form came to be considered an archetypal piece of American culture, despite its European roots and the relatively short reach of any type of performance in the 19th century. It was also interesting to read the two transcripts of actual Punch plays, which greatly added to the context and helped me understand the author's connections of this form with other popular 19th century entertainments, including "freak shows" and other dime museum attractions. My only criticism is that I wish this book offered a more critical stance on the content of the plays themselves--but this is in fact a reference work, so its agenda is primarily to give a factual account. As it stands, that task is carried out in a readable and fairly engaging writing style. If you have at least a passing interest in Punch and Judy, you'll find this work rewarding on one level or another.

While this book likely isn't for everyone, it's a fascinating resource for any reader with an interest in the Punch & Judy puppet plays. I first became aware of these plays through authors such as Pratchett, Gaiman, and Jones, and was interested to learn more about the historic Punch & Judy plays to see how they aligned with and differed from their representations in modern fantasy fiction. This volume focuses mainly on the plays as they developed in the United States, and it's a fantastic resource that's exhaustively researched; the Biographical Dictionary that comprises its second half is truly a labor of love. The presentation is lovely, with lots of contemporary line drawings and photographs to augment the text. This volume is certainly worth checking out for any reader interested in the history and development of these plays.