ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

times; the figure proclaims: “Me Dead!” 123 Punch finishes him and throws the body
offstage.
Unlike the Jim Crow puppet, this blackface role does not merely sing a few
minstrel songs and exit. He lives out a text very similar in action to the other roles in the
play. He enters with a complaint against Punch; Punch makes a fool of him and murders
him. Like the Jim Crow puppets, the Servant does speak the stereotypical “black dialect”
of blackface performance. This breaks, overall, with the American tradition of minstrel
puppetry by giving the object agency. Unlike the Jim Crow character, whose purpose is
but a song and dance relief, this blackface puppet is a real threat to Punch.
Lano may have been the first American puppeteer to use the “Moor” character,
though such a conclusion can only be drawn from omission. 124 If so, Lano reached into
Punch’s past to expand the exotic characteristics of his puppet’s essence. His audiences
witnessed an object with a bushy comb of hair (significantly more exaggerated and
“ethnic” than previous blackface puppets), carrying a beaded mallet, enter the stage and
battle Punch. By using a text where the blackface role is a foreign servant who does not
sing the traditional blackface songs, Lano engendered a more exotic principle in the eidos
of blackface puppetry.
The D’Arc/Bullock Royal Marionettes and post-1850 Punch and Judy narrowed
the possibilities of blackface puppetry by reducing the servant to a song and dance, T.D.
Rice clown. They also disrupted this limited essence of the blackface puppet’s corporeal
123
John Payne Collier, The Tragical Comedy, or Comical Tragedy of Punch and Judy, typescript
(London: S. Prowett, 1828), 24.
124
There are simply no examples of this character mentioned in records of American Punch and
Judy work prior to Lano.
99