Puck's Notion of the Kind of Fancy-Dress Charity Ball That Would Be a Real, Solid Financial Success

Joseph Keppler crowds a masked-ball floor with the era's most recognizable Republican and Democratic grandees — Blaine, Grant, Conkling, Cleveland, Evarts, Reid, and Tammany's John Kelly — all rendered in Keppler's signature grotesque caricature: oversized heads, exaggerated physiques, and period-costume mockery. Puck himself conducts a band of newspaper editors whose hats are labeled Herald, Sun, World, Times, Staats-Zeitung, and Evening Post, implicating the press as equal participants in the political circus. The caption's joke is that charging admission to watch these figures embarrass themselves would guarantee charitable profits. Keppler's figures carry the ethnic exaggeration commonplace in 1880s illustrated humor — drooping noses, thick jowls, and racialized facial typing used routinely by Puck to signal ethnic and political identity to its largely middle-class readership.