Welcome to Over50sForum! The site for people over 50 to chat, make friends, discuss, share, and generally be part of something that's fun and friendly :)
This is hardly a laughing matter. This desk bound functionary is quoting from (and adding to) the inscription at the Statue of Liberty in New York. Are we to assume that he is speaking ironically and intends to impose the strict letter of the law in deciding who is, and who is not, allowed sanctuary in the U S of A? Is he capable of bending the rules in order to make his speech a true account of his intention? However we look at this it does not look at all funny.
This whole scene is surely satirical. The trendy TV programme and the trendy viewer (and family) alert us to the absurd pretention of calling Beatlemania in such grandiloquent terms. The people are portrayed in unnatural (and presumably trendy) shapes.
Two vultures are looking at a series of severed heads attached to poles in the ground. This genre is known as ‘gallows humour’ and marks a serious change to the mainstream of Punch jokes.
Punch’s days were numbered by 1980. This cartoon strikes me as a desperate attempt to make a come back by attacking some sacred cows. Scroggins is the man on the left. The inspector is in the middle. The man on the right looks to me like a barrister. (Surely not the magistrate or the judge!) How times had changed by the time Punch ceased publication.
I sense that this joke is ironic. The idea is that Deborah is expected to ignore her domestic interests because of a passionate support for the campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Here it is the old, not the new norm, that appears to be dominant although we are meant to think the opposite was the case.