Nowhere is the comic art of puppet theater taken more seriously than in Russia.
Here the mastery of grotesque and ridiculous dangly creatures can be studied intensively for several years at the St Petersburg Theatrical Academy.
The head of the academy's puppet theater department, Anya Ivanova, said new students have a choice of four disciplines -- actor, director, stage designer or puppet technologist. The latter become the Guiseppes to Russia's Pinocchios, experts in the mechanics of puppet-making.
Puppet theater in Russia developed from street entertainment, similar to Britain's Punch-and-Judy shows, and the first eyewitness to write about such a spectacle was a German traveler who was in Moscow in 1636. Bible stories and mythology were common themes.
In the 1920s the Soviet government gave puppets an official place in socialist culture, opening a number of special puppet theaters around the country.
Puppets were considered politically harmless in comparison with real people and from the 1960s onwards many artists transferred from conventional theater to puppet theater because through this genre they could express ideas which could not be spoken openly on the stage.
The St Petersburg puppet theater department was the first of its kind in the country, opening its doors in 1959. Its graduates went on to found similar institutions in towns such as Yaroslavl, Yekaterinburg and Nizhny Novgorod, but to this day there is no such department in Moscow.
During my visit to the puppet department second-year students on the acting course were demonstrating their ability to control the flailing limbs of marionettes and give them voice in outlandish accents.
In their first year the students had worked with glove puppets and their progression to marionettes posed a considerable challenge as each one has up to 20 strings attached to the various joints of its body.
One slip of the performer's wrist can have dire consequences, as acrobats entangle themselves in an unwanted embrace or a horse is spontaneously decapitated.
But when things go right the interaction of humans and puppets is hilarious to behold, as for instance an enraged husband chases his wife's lover around the house and in the confusion the two male actors swap marionettes.
The main problems Russian puppet theater faces today are a lack of plays specifically written for puppets as well as technical backwardness, Ms Ivanova said.
She has been to England and saw that in Western theater special effects such as flames or an underwater kingdom are relatively easy to realize. "Here, even if we have the ideas in the first place, we don't have the equipment to put them into practice."
Her advice to potential puppet playwrights was that they should work closely with the puppet designers to understand how their characters can move and what can be left out of the script -- only the most essential words should be spoken.
Director Yevgeny Ugryumov is a graduate of the puppet department who now works in the Marionette Theater on Nevsky Prospect. He has adapted two of Hans Christian Andersen's fairytales, "The Swineherd" and "The Steadfast Tin Soldier," for planchette (table) puppets. The production can be seen this Christmas.
It is full of humorous moments but the stories both end very sadly. In one a prince disguised as a swineherd discovers his true love is vacant and stupid and in the meantime his favorite nightingale dies of loneliness. In the other a one-legged tin soldier falls in love with a paper ballerina and they burn to death together in an oven.
The theater is hoping to attract St Petersburg's smallest children -- "we want them as soon as they're born" -- its publicity officer said. But Mr Ugryumov is not averse to making them cry.
"That would be a great achievement," he said. "I doubt that they will cry, but if they do, it will mean they sympathize with and feel sorry for the characters. I would be delighted."