A Selection of Cartoons from PuckKeppler, Joseph Ferdinand
General
A Selection of Cartoons from Puck
Keppler, Joseph Ferdinand
American wit and humor, Pictorial
of success is quite unconscious of the attempts of PUCK’S water-dog
to catch him, may be supposed to show the usual disregard that Wealth
entertains for Wit:
The fox, of course, is the ingenious Mr. James G. Blaine. The hyena,
ex-speaker Kiefer, and the next animal of doubtful breed “Star Route”
or “Soap” Dorsey. The paw and the head seen in the reeds behind the
dog belong to Brady. The lineaments of Ben Butler may be discerned in
the head of the frog, and the nature of the beast in the distention of
the belly thereof. At the other end of the cartoon, General Grant’s
features, without distortion or caricature, fit the head of the dead
lion. Next to him “Secor” Robeson lies in the similitude of a dead
boar, incapable of mischief for all his glaring eye-balls. In the
foreground, Roscoe Conkling lies a dead pouter pigeon. (Caricaturists
frequently showed Mr. Conkling as a pouter pigeon, but most of them
carried the analogy too far and made a frail, spindle-shanked thing
of him. In this picture the thickly feathered legs and stout frame of
the bird do not bely its sturdy original.) The owl is the late John
Kelly--and a powerful and accurate owl he was, too, in his time! The
pendent monkey is T. C. Platt, who was at that time suffering from one
of the temporary eclipses which flecked the pathway of the political
adventurer with appropriate forecasts of oblivion.
[Illustration]
THE UNIVERSAL CHURCH OF THE FUTURE--FROM THE PRESENT RELIGIOUS OUTLOOK.
_PUCK, January 10th, 1883._
The times change, and we change with them. When this cartoon was
designed, the popular theological fad was the harmonization of science
and religion, and the immediate cause of its appearance was some
utterance, now forgotten, but at the time considered highly audacious,
of the Reverend Heber Newton. It was, we believe, the introduction of
the practice of “slumming” which changed the current of clerical taste.
[Illustration]
POSITIVELY LAST AWAKENING OF THE DEMOCRATIC RIP VAN WINKLE.
_PUCK, October 27th, 1880._
The picture of the Democratic party as Rip Van Winkle was suggested by
the fact that in 1880, when it appeared, (Oct. 27) the party had been
for just twenty years wrapt in the sleep of political inactivity. The
figure of the old sleeper is the one made familiar by Mr. Jefferson’s
wonderful interpretation. He starts up from his twenty years’ slumber
to see a spectral host flit by him, as he lies upon the mountain
crag--Douglas, Greeley, McClellan, Seymour, Tilden, and Hancock the
Superb, leading the doomed line of hapless Presidential candidates. The
mean realities of life are represented by the two fiery-eyed owls in
the tree at the old man’s back--General B. F. Butler and Mr. John Kelly
of Tammany Hall, who never appeared in national politics, except as
secret and mischievous birds of prey.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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