Pickings From Punch: Reprinting Humour in the Transnational Press

résumé de la communication : When Punch appeared on newsstands each Wednesday, content-hungry editors set about pillaging its pages in search of jokes to reprint. Some repackaged them in columns with headers like 'Jokes of the Day' or 'Pickings from Punch', while others squeezed stand-alone gags into random spots as column fillers. In Britain, the first reprints appeared in the evening press within hours, but it was best-selling weekly papers that provided Punch's biggest secondary readership, and placed its humour in front of an audience far exceeding those who read the paper directly. After this initial feast, clippings from Punch continued to circulate around the anglophone press, cropping up months later in Sydney, Cape Town, or New York. Some jokes even crossed linguistic borders and appeared in translation in France, Germany, any other countries. This paper explores the reprinting of Punch's humour as part of a broader theorisation of the forces that enabled and impeded the transnational circulation of humour during the nineteenth century. It also reflects on how digitisation has enabled us to trace Punch's reach across textual, linguistic, and national boundaries.

Keynote presentation: Dr Bob Nicholson (Edge Hill University, UK)