Morality Tales vs Punch and Judy
The stories we tell say a lot about who we are and who we want to be
It’s Granny’s birthday, and everyone is excited. Kasper, Gretel, the Witch, the Thief, the King and Crocodile have all come to celebrate and share some doughnuts. There is a great big bowl of them. But wait. Where are the doughnuts? Oh no! The Devil must have stolen them! After him, with Policeman Schill!
But what’s this? The Devil has eaten all of the doughnuts himself! “Oy, oy, oy, my tummy!” he cries. What a pity, now he won’t be able to enjoy Granny’s party! The old lady has got fresh doughnuts from the baker and offers him one. ‘Oy, oy, oy, my tummy,’ he cries. Now everyone is laughing, apart from the poor old Devil.
I recounted this story the other day at a friend’s birthday party. He was on his third piece of cake, and watching him scoff it down with gusto, the image of the Devil popped into my head. I said, ‘Remember what happened to the Devil when he ate all the doughnuts!’ That earned me nothing but blank stares. ‘You know... “Oy, oy, oy, my tummy”?’ I tried. Nothing.
I told the above story, which is a very common theme in German puppet shows, based on an illustrated children’s book from the 1950s called Alarm im Kasperletheater (Alarm at the Puppet Show). It became a classic, especially in East Germany, where the state-owned film studio DEFA made it into an animated short film.
This triggered an interesting debate. ‘We don’t really do educational puppet shows in Britain. Ours don’t lend themselves to life lessons,’ I was told. ‘Have you ever watched a Punch and Judy Show?’ I admitted that I never had in full. I once managed to secure a space on the balcony of the Punch and Judy pub in London's Covent Garden while a live puppet show was performed on the square below. Apparently, the place gets its name from the puppet show, which was first performed nearby in the 17th century.
An animated discussion ensued during which I was told that – much like my story of the Devil and the doughnuts – Punch and Judy shows always follow the same pattern (albeit with some variation) and that everyone in the UK grows up with the story:
Mr Punch is supposed to look after the baby while his wife Judy goes out to do some shopping. He fails miserably and either chucks the baby out of the window, drops it or…puts it into a sausage machine (?!). Naturally, Judy isn’t very happy about that when she returns, and an argument breaks out during which Mr Punch beats her to death with his stick (I’ve learnt subsequently that this tradition is the origin of the word ‘slapstick’).
The commotion attracts the attention of an officious policeman who then also becomes acquainted with Mr Punch’s stick. Then a crocodile turns up, and Punch gets warned by the gleefully shouting audience, who are entirely on his side during his violent rampage, that ‘he’s behind you!’ He then needs a doctor who, for some reason, attempts to treat Punch by wallopping him with a stick and naturally finds out that Punch is much better at.. ehm.. punching people. Sometimes, a ghost, the Devil or a hangman turn up to punish Mr Punch, but he usually beats them all too, squealing his famous catchphrase "That's the way to do it!’ before concluding the show to whoops and cheers.
“But… is there no comeuppance?’ I ask, confused and mildly disturbed. ‘Nope,’ I’m told, ‘everyone wants Punch to win, and he usually does.’ Apparently, there is no moral to the story. Just pure entertainment, perhaps even cathartic release in the fact that Punch gets to do what he likes without having to suffer the consequences.
Punch and Judy is a seaside classic, something people would have watched on holiday or during a day out, and who wants to be lectured in their spare time? I subsequently found out that it was initially intended for adults. In older versions, Punch sometimes had a mistress called Pretty Polly, and the whole thing was a tad more bawdy — also in best British seaside tradition.
I understand why that would have been (and still is) a powerful concept. When I watched a version on the internet later, the children in the audience were beside themselves with glee at Punch’s doings, cheering him on and warning him of danger. At one point, the Devil threatened to steal and eat all their sweeties, so the cheering when Punch beat him with his stick was even louder.
It’s still an odd concept to my German mind. We grew up with heavily moralised stories or, to use the modern phrase, stories that were ‘pädagogisch wertvoll’ – ‘educationally valuable’. There is a long tradition of that. The most famous example is the classic Grimms' Fairy Tales, in which pretty horrific things happen to children when they do things they shouldn’t.
Take Little Red Riding Hood. The French original, by which I mean the first properly published version by Charles Perrault, ends with the wolf having eaten both the child and her grandmother and going to sleep. There is no happy ending, with Perrault explaining that: ‘From this story one learns that children, especially young lasses, pretty, courteous and well-bred, do very wrong to listen to strangers.’ It’s an old version of ‘stranger danger.’
The Brothers Grimm added a very German element to this: obedience. When her mother sends her into the woods to visit her grandmother, she says to the girl: ‘Behave yourself on the way, and do not leave the path.’ It’s not so much that she talked to a stranger that she got into trouble, but that she disobeyed her mother in the first place.
Another famous and iconic German tale for children – a sort of boy version of Little Red Riding Hood – is Max and Moritz: A Story of Seven Boyish Pranks by Wilhelm Busch, first published in 1865. In it, the eponymous heroes play tricks on people, and it almost ends up very badly for them each time. Their last victim is a farmer whose grain sacks they slit. He catches the boys and puts them in the sack. They get taken to the mill and ground into pieces. Then the miller’s ducks eat the bits. Everyone is happy about that. ‘God be praised! The town is free from this great rascality!’
But most nightmarish for me as a kid were the Struwwelpeter tales published by Heinrich Hoffmann in 1845. There are ten illustrated stories, one more gruesome than the next, warning children not to do certain things, or it will end up badly for them. Some were fair enough, like The Story of Wicked Friedrich, who tortures animals and in turn gets bitten by a dog. But I thought it was a bit harsh that Konrad, who wouldn’t stop sucking his thumbs, had them cut off by a mad tailor with giant scissors. Or that the girl who plays with matches burns to death, and only her cats mourn for her.
There were early English translations of all these German morality tales from the Brothers Grimm to Max and Moritz and Struwwelpeter. The Grimm fairy tales were even tough in schools in England in the 19th century, presumably because they were deemed ‘educationally valuable’. In the US, the huge influx of German immigrants at that time popularised the stories in the New World, too.
But I feel there is something distinct about the clear and stark moral lessons of German folk tales, particularly when it comes to themes like obedience, order, cleanliness and impeccable behaviour. By contrast, British children’s stories appear to be dominated more by a sense of eccentricity and escapism. Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland came out the same year as Max and Moritz.
British storytellers also appear to be far more at ease with the idea of likeable rogues who get away with their misdeeds. I was recently introduced to Zippy, a character from the long-running British children's television series Rainbow. Again, from my German point of view, I was astonished how naughty, rude, greedy and irritating Zippy was allowed to be, and children clearly loved him.
By contrast, the Bavarian public broadcaster BR refused to show a dubbed version of the American show Sesame Street in 1973. After all, they fretted, Oscar the Grouch glorified vagrancy, Earnie and Bert were two men living together and the setting was a dilapidated street in America. And of course, Cookie Monster gets to eat as many cookies as he wants without stomach pain… ‘educational infamy’, deemed BR.
The stories we tell our children reveal a great deal about ourselves and our societies, or perhaps more accurately, they reveal a great deal about the societies the storytellers would like to live in, about their own fears, desires, and visions. That’s why children’s movies, TV shows, books and education are as contested today as they have always been. Kids, I think, just enjoy a good story – wherever they grow up.
I have never seen a Punch & Judy show, perhaps it’s an English thing, and never understood it, so thank you for the explanation. I was vaguely aware that the original Grimms’ fairy tales were much darker. Is the DEFA animation from the same people who gave us The Singing Ringing Tree? Absolutely baffling, weird colour palette too. Have you ever seen our public safety films aimed at children? Terrifying tales of the dangers of rivers, quarries, and railway power lines. And I didn’t have Zippy, Rainbow, and by extension Bungle on my Thursday morning bingo card. Good read Katja.
Very interesting article. I may be the only Brit of a certain age never to seen a Punch and Judy show in its entirety. I suspect my mother didn't think it funny at all with its wife beating and kept me away from it ! I will have to ask her. She doesn't like dolls either and that might extend to puppets. I did play with dolls though.