A British satirical magazine with a habit of laughing at the strange. Autumn 1848. Sea serpents were the talk of Britain after the HMS Daedalus sighting, and Punch's satirists joined the craze; an older Wikipedia article even credits it with a humorous canoe explanation for the Plumper serpent, a claim still unconfirmed. In 1852 it answered the Monongahela report with a comic song, "The Capture of the Sea-Serpent," sung by the Serpent's Head. By 1900 it was mocking the Edith Villas ghost crowd in West Kensington. Its three suspects were the spook, a local humourist, or a pub landlord.
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