ABC NEWS: “Childlike or childish? How these artists are tapping into their inner child…

Getting into the gross stuff

The inner child isn’t only drawn to bright colours and simple patterns — something the Snuff Puppets seize upon.

Based out of Naarm/Melbourne, this group of artists create riotous public shows with giant puppets, harnessing the fascination people of all ages have with things that are gross, silly, over-the-top.

Standing at about 10-feet high, the puppets represent everything from enormous babies to seagulls to “the full range of genitals”.

Chief executive and co-artistic director Andy Freer says the sheer scale of the puppets takes adult audience members back to childhood.
“As a child you see these big adult heads coming down at you, and all those emotions and memories come flooding back — there is fear, but there is also joy and excitement,” he says on The Art Of.

“And I think as we grow older, we do lose this sense of excitement and we get stressed about very boring things.”

Freer says they like playing with “very taboo subjects”, and puppets help them push those limits.

“You can do things with puppets that you really can’t do with any other human actor: you can chop their heads off, you can disembowel them, they can give birth.”
One of their notorious skits, performed at festivals all around the world, is a comment on the meat industry.

It starts off with a herd of puppet cows creating a ruckus among a crowd, which always gets a lot of chuckles. But then a man dressed as a butcher arrives to round them up, and the performance turns into a cacophony of blood, excrement (both fake, of course) and general pandemonium.

“It just gets worse and worse and worse, and people are horrified,” Freer says with a chuckle.

“But they’ve been laughing, and horrified at the same time, so they’re reverting to this very immediate, childlike response.”

The audience reactions go beyond shrieks and chuckles, too. Freer says they once received a random postcard after one of their shows from someone who had been struggling with depression.

The person said the “chaos and the magic and the wildness” was an invaluable help.

“It made him realise that life can be a crazy madhouse, and we can all have fun and it’s not so serious after all.”

– https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-26/the-art-of-the-inner-child