1
/
of
1
Leila's Books
PUPPETS AT LARGE - Scenes and Subjects From Mr. Punch's Show.(Illustrated)
PUPPETS AT LARGE - Scenes and Subjects From Mr. Punch's Show.(Illustrated)
Regular price
$0.99 USD
Regular price
Sale price
$0.99 USD
Shipping calculated at checkout.
Quantity
Couldn't load pickup availability
"Puppets at Large" By F. Anstey.
—These humorous dialogues and monologues reprinted from Punch contain some of the funniest things ever written by Anstey. But to say this is to praise very highly, for Anstey has, without question, the true comic inspiration. He does not jest, as it were, by accident, but because he has a strong, creative impulse for wit.
"Doing a Cathedral" is as excellent a piece of fooling as there is in our modern comic literature. The Spectacled Spinster, who when she hears from the Verger that the Early Christians used baptism by total immersion at once calls them Baptists, and sets them down as Dissenters in whom no respectable person can take any further interest, is inimitable. Almost as delightful is the stodgy sightseer who is perplexed by the thought that doing the cathedral takes so long, and who keeps thinking that he ought to have told the head waiter at the 'Mitre' "to keep back those chops." "Saturday Night in the Edgware Road" is a wonderfully contrived piece of incoherent street-babble, and the dialogue with Bosch, "The Courier of the Hague," is full of humor. Certainly Anstey has the sympathy of comprehension in a most astonishing degree. Dickens had, of course, greater imagination, greater eloquence, and greater power of construction, but not Dickens himself had a greater power of getting the essential humor out of a commonplace person and a commonplace situation.
—These humorous dialogues and monologues reprinted from Punch contain some of the funniest things ever written by Anstey. But to say this is to praise very highly, for Anstey has, without question, the true comic inspiration. He does not jest, as it were, by accident, but because he has a strong, creative impulse for wit.
"Doing a Cathedral" is as excellent a piece of fooling as there is in our modern comic literature. The Spectacled Spinster, who when she hears from the Verger that the Early Christians used baptism by total immersion at once calls them Baptists, and sets them down as Dissenters in whom no respectable person can take any further interest, is inimitable. Almost as delightful is the stodgy sightseer who is perplexed by the thought that doing the cathedral takes so long, and who keeps thinking that he ought to have told the head waiter at the 'Mitre' "to keep back those chops." "Saturday Night in the Edgware Road" is a wonderfully contrived piece of incoherent street-babble, and the dialogue with Bosch, "The Courier of the Hague," is full of humor. Certainly Anstey has the sympathy of comprehension in a most astonishing degree. Dickens had, of course, greater imagination, greater eloquence, and greater power of construction, but not Dickens himself had a greater power of getting the essential humor out of a commonplace person and a commonplace situation.
Share
