Mr Punch rather downcast

Press, 18 December 1976, Page 17

Mr Punch rather downcast

Pick of Punch. Edited by William Davis. Hutchinson. 192 pp. $10.40. (Reviewed by Naylor Hillary) According to the “Illustrated Moscow News” of May, 1998, the Chairman’s * Own 17th/21st Cossack Lancers have at last charged in to liberate the Zulu peoples from long years of repression by class traitors. Cossack and Zulu are now looking forward to a brave new future in which the Russians can enjoy their new comrades’ uranium. The same issue of this remarkable magazine includes a new chapter in the serial “Sanderschenko of the River” (“Can’t stand the taste of hot napalm, you Gulla-Gullas.” said Mr Commissar Sanderschenko); the stirring poem “Mandalay* (“Come you back to Mandalay, where your missile-frigates lay: Can’t you ’ear their radar ’ummin’ from Rangoon to Mandalay?”) and notes on the work of Artur Konandyl and his remarkable hero Sherlov Homes. Of course, only the annual “Pick of Punch” would describe the new Russian naval race round the Indian Ocean and include a graphic picture of the ramming of a foreign vessel which tried to intervene among the hundred competing warships. Only the same annual would provide guides to London for squatters and Arab sheiks, and a guide for Russian spies in

London “Perhaps your greatest trials will come while waiting for the trains on quiet English station platforms . . .”). For young readers there is a guide to anarchism (“You are expected to have certain basic skills like stringing bailiffs from lamp-posts”) and for those with precise minds a legal dictionary which includes: “Appeal — Legal version of double or quits”; "Oath — Method of allying perjury to blasphemy.”). But while much of the text and cartoons remain as delightful as “Punch” readers have learned to expect in more than a century, the mood of the book when taken at a single dose is far from happy. If these are the things “Punch” has chosen to make Britons laugh about in the last year, Britain is indeed in parlous circumstances. The tone is towards economic collapse and totalitarian government and because these things are rather more than possible in Britain today a reader outside the country may feel that to laugh at them is almost an insult. The sense of despair creeps through the humour; it is only just relieved by characters like the mercenary in Angola who advertised outside his tent a weekly special rate for killings and held his prisoners alive until his commander’s cheques were cleared.