Punch Cartoons of the Great War (Illustrated)

The Great War was dominated by two satirical papers; Punch and the journal best known by it’s original name, The Wipers Times. Punch magazine was a well-established journal comparable in style and content to today’s Private Eye. It had a wide circle of distribution and was recognised by the British Nation as a middle-class and supposedly unbiased account of current affairs. The two papers had many similarities, the greatest being that they shared the same ethos. Both believed that comedy should be employed in a cathartic role against the tension, fear and grief caused by the fighting. However, both dramatically diverge in outlook, contents, the ideas they pursued and the ways in which these ideas were expressed and laid out within each paper. Punch, or The London Charivari, officially started production in 1842, although several magazines with almost identical titles had been in circulation for some time. The concept for all of these magazines was however the same – they were anti-establishment, politically motivated satires, although the humour they contained was of a fairly lowbrow level. The body of each magazine was based around three main types: short articles, poems and black-cut illustrations – small prints which accompanied puns either in the text or which ran underneath. These prints became Punch’s most distinctive trademark, and the magazine helped initiate the techniques of using captioned pen and ink drawings to depict political comedy which are still used to great extent in newspapers today. In “A History of Punch” (Collins, 1957), R.G.G. Price describes the ways in which Punch used these new techniques to instigate its own brand of humour: “The mock systemisation (of the articles and illustrations) and the pin-pointing of the targets – two different types of joke – created a tension between them. This kind of tension is one of the great Punch qualities. The standard of writing and pithiness varied very much from item to item. The political material was, on the whole, keener than the social. Though Punch attacked separate abuses, it had no programme and no philosophy”