Good Humor Man

Once a week for 81 years (wartime excepted), the reigning wits of Punch have met in an elegant office at London's 10 Bouverie Street to eat, drink beer, make puns, argue politics and carve their initials in the dining table. Last week, at the famed Punch Round Table, the ghosts of onetime Punchinellos Tennyson, Thackeray and Mark Lemon might have quit the premises in disgust. For the first time in its history, the venerable humor magazine was to have an editor who was an artist instead of a writer.

But Punch's well-ensconced readers would not be startled from their armchairs: they had chuckled over the cartoons of rotund Cyril Kenneth Bird, 61, for years. As art editor, Bird, a jolly, crinkly little man, has been responsible for much of the streamlining of Punch in recent years. He had worked under quiet and gracious Editor Edmund George Valpy Knox* ("Evoe" to his readers), who was now retiring at 67. Bird will take over as editor next All Fools Day.

Punch readers know Bird as "Fougasse," the signature on his sophisticated, economically limned cartoons. Trained as a civil engineer, he went to Gallipoli as a sapper with the Royal Engineers in World War I. One day he stepped on a German land mine (a type called the fougasse), and was all but killed. He was bedridden for four years with a broken back; and started to draw. A correspondence-school art teacher sent one of his drawings to Punch, which has been gobbling his work ever since.

Punch now sells 176,000 copies a week, higher than prewar but a shade under the 1947 record of 184,000. Any change Bird makes will be gradual; he doesn't want to lose an old reader to gain a new one. He brushes off inquiries about his plans: "Nothing is ever planned on Punch'' he chuckles. "It just happens."

* Elder brother of Msgr. Ronald Knox, mystery-story writer and Catholic Bible translator (TIME, Nov. 15).

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