The Magazine Punch of Peasant Caricatures, particularly the starving Irish peasantry, originally from a time of keep them ignorant and illiterate and give them cartoons is closed. There are more than a few laughs about this one.
The old joke, "Punch is not as funny as it used to be - but then again it never was", drew little laughs as it folded.
Four years later the Egyptian businessman Mohamed al Fayed brought it back to life.
He funded new exposés on the likes of Peter Mandelson, the architect of New Labour, and the media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
But eventually it was costing £40,000 per issue to produce with subscriptions at only 6,000 and Mr Al Fayed closed the title again in 2002.
The magazine, which was a British institution, had carried articles by William Makepeace Thackeray and A. A. Milne as well as cartoons by the likes of Sir John Tenniel, the illustrator of "Alice in Wonderland". It had particularly insulting cartoons, during the Irish famine, which was a calculated engineered holocaust by the British Government, that reduced the Irish population from 9 million to 3 million in the space of 2 years. Modern revisionist historians and journalists, who are salaried by the British secret services, are still trying to re-write Irish history and erase this, among other facts from the records.
Then there are cartoons from the Republic !
The British formally protested publication of a caricature by Adolphe Willette in Le Courrier Français of April 17, 1898, which showed Queen Victoria walking with a bottle of rum in her hand (Figure 4). The British again protested in the aftermath of a special issue of Le Rire of November 23, 1899, designed by Willette, which bitterly attacked British imperialism ; for example, one drawing depicted a crucified Ireland asking, "Oh God, who I have long implored! Are you English?" (Figure 5) (16
FIGURE 5. Britain protested this November 23, 1899 issue of the French journal Le Rire, portraying a crucified Ireland.
One of the most famous diplomatic incidents in the history of caricature was provoked by an anti-British issue of L'Assiette au Beurre published on September 28, 1901, designed by jean Veber. Filled with bitter attacks on the use of concentration camps by the British during the Boer War, the most sensational caricature depicted "impudent Albion" in the form of a woman displaying her backside to the world, upon which could be seen the features of King Edward VII. King Edward personally complained about this drawing to French ambassador Paul Cambon, who wrote to his brother that the design was "scandalous,"
