"PUNCH" AND NEW ZEALAND

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 113, 22 August 1941, Page 7

"PUNCH" AND NEW ZEALAND

(Written for "The Listener" by

C. R.

ALLEN

instances of New Zealanders who got into Punch. His list is representative, but not complete. Could anyone supply such a list? He makes no mention of a syndicate of students at Selwyn College who sent in the following: Stump Orator: We want financial reform, we want social reform, we want licensing reform. A Voice from the Crowd: You want chloroform, ‘ This was submitted and paid for by money order. The proceeds were dissipated at a little party. Hiscocks, who was cartoonist-in-chief to the Free Lance in the days of Dick-Seddon’s zenith, had a penchant for drawing George Fisher. He succeeded in getting an enfant terrible joke into Punch. The picture showed the enfant at the side of the breakfast table, Paterfamilias at one end, and Materfamilias at the other. Paterfamilias was simply George Fisher. Noel Ross collaborated with his father Malcolm Ross in a collection of prose sketches entitled "The Light and Shade of War." A Golfing Joke I know a New Zealander who encountered the following joke which Punch used. It may be said that he took part in it. He was playing golf on some seaside links, and noticed a lady seated on a bunker. He called out "Fore!" with no avail,.so he approached the sedentary one, and said "Don’t you know it’s dangerous to sit there?" "Tt’s all right," she replied, "I’m sitting on my mac," In the Punch version the lady’s age was advanced to the sere and yellow, I: a recent issue, Pat Lawlor gave

and a piece of newspaper substituted for the mac. I cannot say who the artist was to. illustrate this perfectly good new joke. I have never got into Punch myself, but I once took a novel into the office in Bouverie Street. I was met by an office boy who passed me on to a young girl. It appeared to me that a state of things existed such as is prognosticated in "News From Nowhere," «by William Morris. London was being run by children. However I was ultimately ine troduced to someone who seemed to have come to years of discretion. "It’s very unusual for an author to bring -his own novel in for review," he said severely. "The proper channel is the publishing house." "But I do like your reviews," [ pleaded. "Very well," he replied, noticing the catch in my voice, "I’ll run my eye over it, and if I think it worth while, I'll send it on to one of the reviewers, They’re all in the country just now." I was swept by an intolerable nostalgia for the Cumberland moors or the hopfields, or the rolling Sussex downs, or the red roads of Devon. I envisaged the reviewers with daisy chains about their necks scarifying the latest lucubration of Oliver Sheep-Bleater or Sigismund Poppoffski. But he must have thought the thing worth a paragraph, for he sent it on to one of those buccolic appraisers who professed to be baffled by it. A programme celebrating the Centennial of " Punch,’ heard recently from 2YA, will be repeated from 1YA on Sunday, August 24, at 4.0 p.m.