Web Video / Puppet History

"Kinda similar to those people that danced 'til they died in France."

Today we take a look at yet another chapter in the heavy, heavy book that we call history!

A Web Video series created and hosted by Watcher, Shane Madej teaches his friend Ryan Bergara and a special guest all about the weirdest moments in world history... with puppets. Starring the Professor, a blue muppet in glasses and a pith helmet with a satchel full of jellybeans and a heart full of wacky historical facts.

Each episode, the Professor tells the tale of a crazy (but true) event in history, periodically stopping to quiz Ryan and the guest. Correct answers (or answers the Professor finds amusing) earn history points. The person with the most history points at the end of the day wins the coveted cup of the History Master.

Spiritual Successor to Ruining History, Shane's other show on Buzzfeed.

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This show provides examples of:

• Actor Allusion: In "Hatshepsut: The Forgotten Pharaoh", the Professor ponders the mystery of why Hatshepsut’s successor obscured her legacy. “The mystery as to why [Hatshepsut's] legacy was erased remains…not fully understood.” Ryan knowingly chuckles at this line.
• Actually Pretty Funny: During the Miyamoto Musashi episode, Ryan and Garrick Bernard can't help but crack up at Miyamoto Musashi's repeated jerkass tendencies.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: "The Affair of the Poisons" gives us this gem:
  Professor: Vigoreaux claimed to know of at least 400 people peddling poisons and potions to the Parisian public!
• Aerith and Bob: The demons seemingly possessing the nuns in "The Demonic Possessions of Loudun" have names ranging from Asmodous, Astraroth, and Coal of Impurity to names like Alex and Dog's Dick.
• Afterlife Antechamber: The theatre the Professor's funeral service is held in turns out to be this. Since puppets (and especially puppets made from inanimate objects) don't have souls the way humans do, all of the puppets were shoved into the theatre and given hobbies like show production in order to kill time until God and the Devil figured out how to sort them.
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: In "The Affair of the Poisons", a skit heavily implies that Marie Busse told Maitre Perrin she poisoned people for a living because she happened to be very drunk at the time.
• Animate Inanimate Object: A great deal of the guest singers are these- specifically, we've seen a pile of diamonds, a propeller from the HMS Britannic, an old-fashioned steam train, Mt. Vesuvius, the Olympic Torch, a Randy Newman-esque coin, a boat oar and a sword that used to be a boat oar, a spool of thread, a snowman, the sacred Golden Stool, Ziryab's oud (a type of string instrument similar to a ukulele), a pair of poison bottles, a flower-bearing boat, a cute little piece of wheat, a chest of gold coins, a book, a freaky stained-glass window, a cloud that knows Who Shot JFK?, the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs, and a prototype for a new musical instrument.
• Art Evolution: Season 2 shows a marked upgrade in the sophistication and variety of the guest singer puppets.
• Artistic License – History: "The Mistress Who Murdered Her Way To The Throne" discusses the allegations that Wu Zetian murdered her own infant daughter and blamed Empress Wang. The daughter who died is said to have been Princess Taiping, who actually lived to the age of 51; the daughter who died as a baby was Princess Si.
• Artistic License – Space: Both "How Hippo Meat Almost Saved America" and the "The Dreadful Demise of the Dinosaurs" refer to the object that hit the earth and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs as a meteor when the broad scientific consensus is that the object was an asteroid. "The Dreadful Demise of the Dinosaurs" also refers to it as a comet and a meteorite interchangeably - those words refer to two very different spacial bodies, as a comet is small and icy while a meteorite is a piece of debris from a comet, asteroid, or meteoroid.
• Author Appeal: Carrying on from True Crime and Ruining History, Shane still likes cool morally ambiguous women from history.
• Author Avatar: For the first season, the Professor really was just Shane (a witty and fun-loving history nerd) - just blue, fuzzy, and with a temper. Shane even lampshaded this in a stream, not getting why everyone freaked out over him. The second season has more separate character traits, like hating being small when Shane has made it very clear he wants to be tiny. By Season 5, it’s clearly established that, in-universe, Shane and the Professor are completely different people.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: While Joyce is away to receive her trophy at the end of the Season Two finale, the Professor takes a moment to thank Ryan sincerely for being such a great guest all season. Ryan accepts the compliment and agrees he's had fun on the show, their usual antipathy completely set aside - though they both quickly agree that this doesn't mean they want to hang out off-set or anything.
• Bad "Bad Acting": The Professor's melodramatic historical reenactments are Played for Laughs.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • At the end of "Hatshepsut: The Forgotten Pharaoh", while the background music from BuzzFeed Unsolved plays, The Professor says the mystery of Hatshepsut’s legacy being erased remains… not fully understood. Ryan gets a kick out of it.
  • The song for "The Great Emu War" starts off with a little adorable wheat singing a song about hoping to become a bread...before being quickly eaten by an emu, who performs the actual song of the week.
  • In "José Rizal: The Philippines' Reluctant Revolutionary", after the Professor explains that Rizal became an idol amongst Andrés Bonifacio's revolutionaries for his patriotic writing despite being more of a reformist who disavowed violence, he asks the episode's contestants how Rizal tried to distance his image from their movement. The skit that follows shows Rizal getting on a boat to help Spain treat yellow fever patients in Cuba, answering the question... but then it doesn't end, with Rizal uneasily pointing out after several seconds that the curtain should've gone down. This is right before the boat captain leaves to take a message and returns to tell him he's under arrest.
  • "The Race to the South Pole" ends with the Professor noting this is usually the point when a false sense of security leads to something bad happening, followed by an ominous pause...and then the episode concludes as normal without incident.
• Black Comedy: Thrives off it, just one example being having a song from a propeller about accidentally chopping people to pieces.
• Black Comedy Animal Cruelty: The Professor and some of his “bad boy” hobbies. As context, he's specifically raising spiders as livestock to eat.
  Ryan: So you’re raising spiders for killing. You’re chasing around bumblebees, terrorizing them. What else are you doing in your free time?
  The Professor: Just chillin’.
• Black Comedy Cannibalism: Unavoidable given the second season finale episode being about the Donner Party, with jokes about how messed up what they did was, on top of the Trauma Conga Line they had to endure.
• Body Horror: The snowman musical guest from the Donner Party episode has several organs he definitely shouldn’t have. His face is also... not where you would expect a snowman's face to be.
• Bond One-Liner: In the first Christmas Episode, "The Story of St. Nicholas", a sketch depicting the story of St. Nick punching Arius for his non-trinitarianism ends this way.
  Arius: Ow! Jesus Christ! Who the hell was that?!
  Nicholas: The name's Nicholas… and don't make me check you twice.
• Brick Joke:
  • The very existence of the Dancing Plague episode is one. invokedBecause Ryan clearly didn't believe Shane when he talked about the dancing plague in BuzzFeed Unsolved, the episode is a lighthearted Take That! directed at him. Hilariously, this episode also happens to be one of Ryan's absolute best performances; the episode ends in a tie, and Ryan loses the tiebreaker only after clearly not trying very hard.
  • A particularly dark one occurs in "The Possessions of Loudun". The Professor's obituary photo after he seemingly gets Killed Off for Real is his WikiFeet picture, which was first joked about in "Mansa Musa: The Richest Man Who Ever Lived".
  • There are a couple of references to "Jokerification" in Season 4, referring to someone getting so browbeat and cynical that they go on an anarchy fueled retaliation (as in the 2019 Joker movie). By Season 4's finale, Ryan's Jokerification was completed when Satan revealed he made a deal with the devil just to finally win a trophy after episodes of snubbing. His final shot in that episode is him with Joker face paint.
• The Bus Came Back:
  • After first appearing in "Stealing The World's Most Expensive Necklace", Kate Peterman goes on to be the special guest in "How America's First Female Detective Saved Abe Lincoln", "The Story of St. Nicholas", "The War of the Golden Stool", and "The Great Emu War".
  • The Pile of Diamonds from "Stealing The World's Most Expensive Necklace" makes reappearances in "The Dancing Plague", where he does an ad-read for MSCHF, and "The Story of St. Nicholas", where he sings "Love on a Shelf".
  • The Propeller comes back to do an ad-read for Skillshare in "The Terrifying Eruption of Mt. Vesuvius" after debuting in "Surviving The Titanic: History's Luckiest Woman".
  • Both the Goose Mummy and Musashi's Oars show up again in "The Story of St. Nicholas" to sing "Mummified Goose" and "Either Oar", respectively, following their first appearances in "Hatshepsut: The Forgotten Pharaoh" and "The World's Greatest/Rudest Samurai".
  • The Beast of Gevaudan reappears in "Ziryab: The World's First Rock Star" to do an ad-read for Bright Cellar. He also claims to be a vegan now.
  • Garrick Bernard is the first guest since Kate to be on the show more than once, guest-starring in "The Affair of the Poisons" following his first appearance in "The World's Greatest/Rudest Samurai".
  • Joyce Louis-Jean becomes the third recurring guest competitor after Kate and Garrick, appearing in "The Grisly Journey of the Donner Party" and then "Ching Shih: The Pirate Queen."
  • After appearing in "The Dancing Plague", Jermaine Fowler returned to compete in "America vs. Smallpox".
  • Sara Rubin returns in "The Demonic Possessions of Loudun" after competing in "The Beast of Gevaudan."
• …But He Sounds Handsome:
  • The Professor never fails to praise the other puppets' musical performances, much to Ryan's chagrin.
    Ryan: You really gotta stop complimenting yourself at the end of these through the veil of a puppet.
  • At the beginning of "The Great Emu War", Ryan tells the Professor that he has a friend named Shane who had a pet bird and then ate it. The Professor responds that this friend sounds like a sexy guy.
• Butt-Monkey: Ryan is the Professor's designated punching bag.
• Call-Back:
  • "The Great Molasses Flood" has one to the very first episode, "Life During the Black Plague". When the Professor says the word "rats", it has the same editing distortion as when he said it in the first episode.
  • "America v. Smallpox" has the professor ask Jermaine if he contracted dancing plague since the last time he was on the show, to which he replies with no. Later in the same episode, the professor name-checks this trope when Jermaine gets the trophy from the "devil" (Shane's hand).
  • From "Mansa Musa: The Richest Man Who Ever Lived":
    • Ryan makes a Borat reference in one of the quiz segments. The Professor laughs, adds 65 jellybeans to his point total, and declares that "You know I'll always give you jellybeans for a Borat!" This is true: he gave Ryan a rotten jellybean for interrupting him to make the same joke in "Hatshepsut: The Forgotten Pharaoh".
    • The singer of the week sings that a fortune can bring good, naming ways one might try to attain it... before saying that if you're a terrible person, you'll probably try to steal a golden stool instead.
  • One of the phrases that the toy Professor that appears at the end of "How Hippo Meat Almost Saved America" says is "All the crops died!", a reference back to "The Dancing Plague".
  • Steven Lim returns as a guest in the Season 6 opener, and reference is made to the fact that his first episode was about the Black Death and aired right before the Covid-19 pandemic.
• Came Back Wrong:
  • The pickle boys from the Christmas Episode, "The Story of St. Nicholas". After St. Nick boasts about having resurrected them from the dead in his musical number, they pop up to dance. Santa notes that they suck at dancing, and once the Professor points out that they don't look all that well in general, he wonders if maybe he shouldn't have done what he did, all while they never stop - or say a single word. Ultimately subverted, as they do wind up getting lines in the second Christmas special and cheerily claim that being undead pickle people isn't so bad, although they do still look… off.
  • Despite attempts to pass it off as an Unexplained Recovery, "How Hippo Meat Almost Saved America" HEAVILY implies this with the Professor, with various subtle (different eye shade, Shane using his regular voice more) and overt (stopping mid lesson to drool over the thought of meat, literally SNARLING and snapping at Ryan when he tries to touch him) moments throughout the episode. It turns out in "The Bloody Life of England's Fastest Surgeon" that this is ultimately averted, however, with The Reveal that the Professor who's been hosting the show for the entire season is actually a hologram imposter.
• Casting Gag: Joyce Louis-Jean appeared in the Ruining History episode "The True Story Of A Pirate Queen" (about Anne Bonney) and competes here in "Ching Shih: The Pirate Queen".
• Cat Scare: A literal example in the Season Two premiere; Kate's cat walks in front of her camera, startling the Professor.
• Chekhov's Gun: The "example window" in "The Defenestrations of Prague," out of which holo!Professor makes his final exit at the end of the season.
• Christmas Episode: "The Story of St. Nicholas", a holiday-themed episode released between Seasons 2 and 3. It’s different from standard episodes in that it has a running plot of the Professor stressing over what gift to give Santa Claus, the episode’s special guest, resulting in previous episodes' puppets (The Pile of Diamonds, Musashi’s Oars, and the Goose Mummy) dropping in to give him ideas. In the end, Santa refuses to sing, so the Professor does the episode's song. Additionally, no History Cup is awarded. Instead the Professor gives both Kate and Ryan presents.
• Contrived Coincidence: Played for Drama, with the unlikelihood being part of the point of its presentation. The Season 5 finale sees the Professor teaching his dino parents all about their kind's own history - and future, including their ultimate extinction. As he does so, he grows increasingly uneasy remembering that he's in the Cretaceous Period, even as he assures himself and them that given the period covers a span of millions of years, they shouldn't have anything to worry about. Then Dinosara offhandedly mentions that they're in Mexico, which would put them in point-blank range if the meteor were to hit… and then Dinosir points out a strange new glowing thing in the sky. The Professor laments the unfairness of how little time he's wound up having with his new family, and the rest of the scene, including the song that carries it out, are about finding peace when confronted with the brevity of life by embracing love, beauty, and uncertainty.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: In "The Bloody Revenge of St. Olga of Kiev," the titular character's husband Igor was killed by having both his legs tied down to bent trees followed by his executioners releasing the trees, tearing the man in half. This sets off Olga's Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• Dark Reprise: The song from "The Puppet History Holiday Spectacular" is a slower, melancholically reflective (though still somewhat silly) song that repeats parts of the melody from the prior episode's upbeat "Asmodeus"; and the song from "The Dreadful Demise of the Dinosaurs" is a reprise of it in turn that is played almost entirely seriously and sincerely as an elegy, keeping comical moments to a bare minimum as the Professor and his parents prepare for the Chicxulub asteroid's impact.
• Deal with the Devil: "The Demonic Possessions of Loudun" ends with the Professor getting attacked by the Genie, having his powers removed, and being sent to the Cretaceous period to die. It's revealed that Ryan had made a deal with the Devil simply to get a trophy, but it's implied that not only did Ryan not know the full scope of the Devil's plan but it's clear that he regrets doing so after realizing what he did.
• Death Glare: The Professor somehow frequently gives them to Ryan, despite not technically being able to change facial expression.
  Ryan: He’s never happy. He looks either indifferent or very disappointed and angry.
• Dem Bones:
  • Downplayed with Death, whose puppet has a classic skeletal design, but isn’t made of bones.
  • Terrifyingly played straight with Santa Claus/St. Nicholas, who appears in the show as a mass of bones with a face and a hat in reference to the fact that while St. Nick is long dead (assuming he ever was a real, living man), his alleged bones are preserved and treasured in various places across the world.
• Destination Defenestration: This is the focus of "The Defenestrations of Prague," season five's second episode. It's also the ultimate fate of Holo-Professor.
• Didn't See That Coming: Neither Ryan nor Garrick Bernard believe that the Yoshioka clan would be so foolish that they would challenge Miyamoto Musashi (who had just easily defeated their top fighter) to another duel. Hilariously, since that exact scenario ends up occurring twice in a row, The Professor asks the exact same question again, with identical answer choices (and Ryan still gets it wrong the second time, sincerely not believing that anyone could possibly be that dumb).
  Ryan: It certainly isn't B.
  The Professor: No, no, of course not. ...Uh, Except it was.
• Digging Yourself Deeper: Ryan in the necklace episode, when he admits he misheard "scandalous seating charts" as "scandalous seeding charts" and was appropriately disgusted. The Professor and Kate are appalled with him, leaving Ryan to try and explain himself, and then to try and point out that it's hardly the grossest thing said on the show.
  Ryan: YOU SAID "GENITAL ORIGAMI"!
• Disproportionate Retribution: The Bye Bye Brothers in “The Affair of the Poisons” advocate poisoning your dentist for telling you to eat less sugar, people who save seats in the movie theater, and people who don’t use their turn signals. Ryan agrees that the last one is a killable offense for him, too.
  • The end of "The Demonic Possessions of Loudun" reveals that Ryan conjured up a deal with the Devil and the Genie to strip The Professor of his powers and have him sent to the Cretaceous Period, all so Ryan could finally get a trophy. However, judging from Ryan's reaction, he apparently didn't know that the Devil intended to send The Professor back in time to die.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Due to either history repeating or the guests trying to make sense of the story, you'll get some of this happening on occasion.
  • Though initially horrified by the concept of a long series of fatal duels, both Ryan and Garrick Bernard quickly begin to view Miyamoto Musashi's duels through the lens of a modern sporting event (most notably basketball).
  • In "The Beast of Gevaudan", the Professor reveals in a skit clearly written to invoke this trope in relation to COVID management that the villagers of Gevaudan continued going out and about their business despite the risk of beast attacks because while the government encouraged them to stay safe at home, it refused to adequately support those who'd be hurt by their resultant inability to work. Ryan guesses before the skit that things would've been "business as usual" in Gevaudan based on pandemic observations, and after it, both he and Sara effectively respond with "oof".
    Monsieur Lafont: But there is a health emergency!
    Villager: Maybe... the government could pay for us to stay home until they solve the health crisis? That seems like the most responsible and safest thing to do, no?
    Monsieur Lafont: Hmmm... No!
  • The episode about smallpox during the American Revolution, due to being produced whilst COVID-19 was still a problem, contains some subtle and not-so-subtle snark about how the reactions to the smallpox pandemic are not all that different to how people reacted to a similar plague now.
  • The Professor, Ryan, and Brian David Gilbert can't think of anything like when a group of radicalized Protestants stormed city hall! ^ExplanationThe attempted insurrection on January 6th
• Double Entendre:
  • When it comes up that Donner Party member Patrick Breen wrote that it was "hard to get wood" in his journal, the Professor and Joyce start using it as a euphemism for something else.
  • In "The Story of St. Nicholas", Ryan responds to hearing that the titular saint's bones supposedly secrete a healing liquid by relating a time he ate a particularly marrow-juicy bone in a restaurant, stating that "I sucked the hell out of that bone."
    Kate: Aaaaaaaaaaaaah, Merry Christmas!
• Double Standard: The Professor points out in "Stealing The World’s Most Expensive Necklace" that Rohan got a light punishment and was released to cheering crowds, compared to Jeanne, who got whipped in prison (even though she got herself out), and Marie Antoinette, whose reputation was permanently sullied even though she literally had nothing to do with the plot and didn't even want the necklace in the first place.
• Early-Bird Cameo:
  • Horse, the musical guest for season three's finale, shows up in that season's second episode, "The War of the Golden Stool", to do an ad-read for Skillshare. He also does this two additional times.
  • The Devil first appears in "The Affair of the Poisons" before appearing as a Puppet Pop In in the following season.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • The show's second episode, "Stealing The World's Most Expensive Necklace," ends in a tie between Ryan and Kate, so the two of them share the victory prize. In later episodes, ties are resolved with tie-breakers obviously rigged in favor of the guest, as part of the Running Gag about Ryan always losing. In Kate's second guest appearance in "How America's First Female Detective Saved Abe Lincoln" she confirms she kept the trophy and everyone behaves as though she won.
  • In some Season 1 episodes, it’s occasionally mentioned that Shane is the Professor’s puppeteer, not helped by the fact that he mostly just uses his own voice for the Professor in this season. This is gradually phased out, to the point where it’s made clear in Season 5 that the two are now completely separate characters.
    • Shane's puppeteering skills also developed over the coming seasons, with the Professor going from fairly static and only really facing one direction to bouncing around his corner of the stage and constantly finding interesting ways to move.
  • Season 1, in general, is this for the show since it merely showcases the bare bones of the show going forward. Alongside the above mentioned examples the first season of the show seemed aimed to be an actual, genuine Quiz show where Ryan and The Professor have a similar relationship to Alan Davies and Stephen Fry. It also appears that Ryan was throwing the tie-breakers on purpose since, as the only regular contestant, Ryan would've had plenty of opportunities to win an episode which seems to have actually been something he could've done in this Season. There is also very little in the way of lore and backstory for the Professor, and the puppets who sing at the end of the episodes have no hints to their horrific origins and eventual purgatory.
• Edutainment Show: This show, like Ruining History before it, is a comedy show with Shane unleashing his history nerd self.
• Embarrassing Nickname: To avoid confusion in the Hatshepsut episode, Ryan Bergara offers to go by "R.B." The Professor and other Ryann immediately start calling him "Arby's", which Ryan hates. The Professor spends the rest of the episode calling him "Beef Boy" or "Beef Man."
• Entertainingly Wrong: In "Isaac Newton's Nemesis", Keith's answer to the first question (where he says that gold and copper coins were still minted by hand) is based on the fact that only modern coins that used to be made of silver had ridging on them. The Professor says his logic makes sense, at least on the surface, but he's still wrong.
• Evil All Along: In "The Bloody Life of England's Fastest Surgeon", the first four musical guests in season five (the hippo from the Fritz Duquesne episode, the window from the defenestration episode, the white tiger from the Trung sisters episode, and the cloud from the Bessie Coleman episode) are revealed to be in cahoots with Holo-Professor in "The Bloody Life of England's Fastest Surgeon". However, this is downplayed in the tiger's case, as his song has him freely admit to having enjoyed murdering innocent humans.
• Exact Words: In "The Story of St. Nicholas", the Professor tells Ryan and Kate that he got them "little gifts" for Christmas. The phrasing isn't for nothing, as it turns out he got Kate a little book of Shakespeare quotes that doubles as a tree ornament… and got Ryan a very, very little $100 bill.
• Excited Kids' Show Host: The Professor is a parody of one. He's genuinely cheery, upbeat, and eager to teach people about history, but he curses like a sailor and regularly gets into arguments with his (adult) guests.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing:
  • Death cameos during Horse's song in "The Great Molasses Flood". Horse dies in the molasses flood almost immediately afterward.
  • The Professor notes that he's physically weak and susceptible and very vulnerable to any climactic turn of event in "The Demonic Possessions of Loudun." Only a couple of moments later, he's ambushed by the Genie, stripped of his powers, and sent to the Cretaceous period.
• Foreshadowing:
  • During the song in The Disastrous 1904 Olympic Marathon, the Olympic Torch curses "the being that cursed [him] with sentience." A season later in The Great Molasses Flood, and it's revealed that The Professor did something on his trip through time that resulted in the musical guests becoming puppets, and in the case of those such as the oars and the Olympic Torch, sentient.
  • The Puppet Pop-Ins, including its seemingly incomprehensible disruptions from the Horse and the unexpected visit from the Devil himself, end up foreshadowing the season finale's twist that Ryan made a deal with the Devil to get a trophy by stripping the Professor of his powers and sending him back to the pre-historical era.
  • The José Rizal episode ends with a song by a book that belonged to Rizal listing all the strange and interesting things one can learn by being as studious as its owner, including how long it'd take a tyrannosaurus to digest them if it ate them. Which one goes on to do to the Professor in the finale.
  • During The Defenestrations of Prague, the Professor repeatedly points out a window in the studio as a place for Ryan and Brian to imagine someone flying out of. Come the end of the Season 5 finale, Ryan finishes off the fake Professor by throwing him through that same window - complete with a snippet of the Window's song from that episode!
• Foregone Conclusion: Ryann Graham makes himself sad throughout the Hatshepsut episode by anticipating things going wrong for the forgotten female pharoah, mostly just on the basis that history is often kind of bleak.
  Ryann: History is sad. He’s gonna turn out to be a dick!
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • "The Disastrous 1904 Olympic Marathon" features a few animations of newspaper hawkers. The newspaper at 6:39 tells a story about an Olympian passing a pineapple through his body in 11 seconds flat, and the newspaper at 10:52 has a story about a man who wanted to build a giant arch and ended up being abandoned by his wife and kids.
  • In the Donner Party episode, in the animatic where Patrick Breen is writing about how it’s hard to get wood, the wagon he’s sitting in says “Posphorus fucked here” on the side. The same phrase also appears on a house in “Ziryab: The World’s First Rock Star” and on the bottom left corner of the chalkboard listing the demon's names in "The Demonic Possessions of Loudun."
  • Transcriptions for all the fake newspapers seen in "The Beast of Gevaudan" can be found here. Most notably, one of the papers apparently reads, "I can’t think of anything else to write for these newspapers, so I put the text in Google Translate and make it French."
  • When recounting a bombing attempt against Cotton Mather's life in "America vs. Smallpox," the bomb's note has a postscript that says "P.S. Pretty fucked up what you did in Salem, my dude."
• Funetik Aksent: In "The Grisly Journey of the Donner Party", the captions on the Donner Lake snowman's song transcribe his drawl when he declares that he's full of other people's "BOWNEZ".
• Gainax Ending: Garrick eats a jellybean and turns into a puppet at the end of the the Musashi episode.
  Ryan: Is he gonna turn back?!
  The Professor: Nope!
• Genki Girl: Kate Peterman is into it, cheering and laughing frequently throughout her appearances. Kristin Chirico is this as well, to the point of becoming an Audience Surrogate for the series's superfans.
• Genre Savvy: Ryan and the guests tend to bounce between attempting to be this, and choosing answers that they find funny or interesting, to mixed results.
  • Three of the more prominent guests in this regard are Kristin Chirico (who already knew about the weirdness of the 1904 Olympics, and was able to use that to answer various questions), Ryann Graham (who correctly predicted various parts of the story using historical precedent), and Garrick Bernard (who used his knowledge of the common tropes of samurai period dramas and anime to inform some of the answers he chose).
• The Ghost: The genie that keeps being mentioned in the multiple-choice questions. It's apparently out to ruin the Professor's life, as stated in "Isaac Newton's Nemesis". Until "The Grisly Journey of the Donner Party" where we see the genie appear in a short skit.
• A Good Name for a Rock Band: The boys keep finding them in "The Affair of the Poisons," specifically the title phrase, "Death Chemists," and "Slaughter Water" (the last of which becomes a Running Gag in the episode).
• Hair-Trigger Temper: As Ryan points out about the Professor, he never looks happy, always disappointed or pissed off.
• Here We Go Again!: At the end of “The Affair of the Poisons,” Garrick forgets what happened last time he won and eats a whole bag of jellybeans.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Said almost word-for-word by Kristin when Shane gets a dry mouth and fumbles his lines during a skit about runners not being allowed to drink water in “The Disastrous 1904 Olympic Marathon.”
• Hypocritical Humor: The Professor derides Ancient Egyptians for their consumerism, then in the next breath starts shilling Puppet History merchandise.
  I’m on a T-shirt! I’m happy about it! So sue me.
• I Am a Humanitarian: It was bound to come up in “The Grisly Journey of the Donner Party.” Lewis Keseberg is the party’s worst offender.
• If It's You, It's Okay: Platonic version. The Professor is scared of all cats except Obi, Sara Rubin's cat seen in "The Beast of Gevaudan."
• I Need a Freaking Drink: By the time the musical performer of "The Grisly Journey of the Donner Party" shows up, a snowman with its face on its bottom half, the episode has guest contestant Joyce Louis-Jean saying that she's planning on having "a big drink of wine after this".
• Insane Troll Logic: In "The War of the Golden Stool", a skit depicting the start of the Third Anglo-Ashanti War lampoons the illogicality of the British going to war with the Asante multiple times while considering it to be within their own trade interests that the Asante nation stayed strong. When a soldier points out to General Garnet Wolseley that trying to burn down the Asante capital instead of letting them keep the fort that they're holding would probably do the opposite of what the British want, Wolseley heartily replies that "Sometimes, the best ideas are bad ideas! Right?"
• In the Style of: Ryan attempts to sing "500 Miles" by The Proclaimers in the Donner Party episode, but does so to the tune of "1,000 Miles" by Vanessa Carlton before falling wildly off rhythm from there so they don’t get sued for copyright infringement.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: The Professor clearly rigs the game against Ryan, he has a Hair-Trigger Temper, and it's hard to tell if he's being genuine or baiting whenever he says he's rooting for Ryan, but he's showcased a lot of interesting historical figures and events while projecting a sincere desire for his "students" to learn about them and have a good time doing so, and he actually sounds small and upset when called "rotten" and even breaks down sobbing in "America vs. Smallpox: How Vaccines Saved the Nation" when Jermaine tells him he feels judged and yelled at over a trick question because "I didn't mean to make you guys cry!"
  • His jerky behavior in Season 5 is explained when it's revealed he's actually been replaced by a demented hologram version of himself.
• Kayfabe: The Professor tries to enforce this, scolding Steven Lim in the first episode for addressing him as "Shane."
  The Professor: When you see Kermit the Frog, you don't ask him, "Hey, how's Jim?"
  • In "The Great Emu War," a conversation about birds turns to Shane's childhood pet:
  Kate Peterman: Shane, you ate your bird?!...wherever you are, Shane??
  The Professor: He sounds like a sexy guy.
• Kids Are Cruel:
  • In the Hatshepsut episode, the Professor and both Ryan(n)s agree that children can be pretty awful as they discuss the relationship between Hatshepsut and her nephew/stepson Thutmose III.
  • In the Musashi episode, when asked if either guest had ever been in a fight, Ryan recalls a time he body-slammed another kid who was being really racist. Once he explains this, Garrick and the Professor both agree that the kid had it coming.
• Killed Offscreen: In "The Puppet History Holiday Spectacular", it turns out that this has happened to all of the puppets, save for supernatural entities like Death, Asmodeus, God, and the Devil. The party that had been built up during the Puppet Pop-Ins turned out to be a trap by Satan to capture all of the puppets turned by the Professor in one place, and kill them all. Their souls were then put in the Wondrium Theatre until Big G figured out where to put them all.
• The Knights Who Say "Squee!": Despite freely acknowledging his asshole shenanigans and comparing his body count to that of a serial killer, Ryan and Garrick embrace Miyamoto Musashi with enthusiasm as an incredibly cool badass that they all think is awesome. Garrick deems him "the greatest of all time" at the conclusion of the story of Musashi's battle with Sasaki Kojiro.
• Lame Rhyme Dodge: "Stealing The World’s Most Expensive Necklace" gives us this exchange:
  Jeanne La Motte: I can't wait to sell this thing.
  Cardinal Rohan: What was that?
  Jeanne La Motte: Uh... I can't wait to tell the queen! ...What a champ you've been.
• Large Ham: Isaac Newton is depicted this way in "Isaac Newton's Nemesis," massively hamming up his oath as Warden of the Mint complete with a dramatic echo effect added to his voice.
• Late to the Realization: In the episode on "The Dancing Plague," Ryan takes a while to catch on. He comes very close to figuring it out on his own...
  Ryan: Kinda similar to those people that danced 'til they died in France.
  [freeze frame on the Professor's shocked face]
  [freeze frame on oblivious Ryan]
  The Professor: Oh yeah, I've heard of them.
  • ...but he doesn't realize it fully until several minutes later.
  Ryan: Wait a second! Oh my God, this is the impetus for the people dancing 'til they died in France!
  The Professor: Yeah, you dipshit!
  Ryan: Holy—hey, fuck you!
• Later-Installment Weirdness: The penultimate episode of season 5, by itself, contains the reveal that the Professor who's been teaching this season is actually a hologram from the puppet purgatory who has developed an intense desire to assume a corporeal, flesh form and is willing to trick and kill Ryan as comeuppance for causing the real Professor's death (which is also revealed to have not stuck) in order to do so, even singing a whole Villain Song about it. Now compare that to season 1, where the closest thing to Lore is the deliberately Played for Laughs appearance of God in the final episode.
• Let's Duet: There have been five so far: "Gore On The Shore"; "Either Oar"; "Bye Bye Juice"; Horse's currently unnamed song, which becomes a duet with God after a couple of verses; and the also currently unnamed song from "The Dreadful Demise of the Dinosaurs".
• Lighter and Softer: Season 6 features less grisly topics and a much more relaxed tone. Lampshaded in "The Deadly Race to the South Pole," when the Professor claims this is usually the point when something bad happens...but it doesn't.
• Loophole Abuse: Saint Olga of Kiev couldn't declare war on the Drevlians on the basis of her being a woman. To get around this, she had her ten-year-old son Sviatoslav climb a horse, while wearing battle armor and wielding a spear, and have him declare war instead.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • The Horse's song starts out as an upbeat ska piece about how much he loves his life and relatives, and right before the chorus the song abruptly goes into chaos as Horse dies an agonizing molasses filled death during the Molasses Flood of 1919. Then it goes right back to comedic as God, with an alarming lack of empathy, informs Horse that he is dead and to go into the afterlife where his family is probably waiting for him. Horse even gladly sings that he hopes his wife is dead.
  • José Rizal's book has one of the most mellow and easygoing songs in the whole series, and mostly concerns a "Reading Is Cool" Aesop, but the penultimate line talks about how the pursuit of knowledge could possibly lead you down a road where "cowards" will kill you if you read too much for their liking—and pops right back to its previous mellow tone just in time for the end.
  • The final moments of the Season 4 finale "The Demonic Possessions of Loudun" swerves to the Genie suddenly appearing and having the week's musical guest possess the Professor in order to get him to strip himself of his powers and get sent back to the Cretaceous Period, where he is seemingly Killed Off for Real. Ryan finally gets the trophy he wanted, but as Sara notes, at the cost of the Professor's life. The episode ends on a rather somber note after about half an hour of hilarity.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed:
  • The coin that acts as a musical guest in the Sir Isaac Newton episode is a clear parody of Randy Newman.
  • The Beast of Gevaudan is an astonishingly similar singer to David Byrne. Guest Sara Rubin remarks out loud that his song sounds like a Talking Heads song.
  • The Bye Bye Brothers in "The Affair of the Poisons" are a parody of Beastie Boys.
• Non-Indicative Name: "The Puppet History Holiday Spectacular!" features no history-lesson and very little holiday cheer (Christmas is only mentioned in the first scene). Instead, the episode is the puppets holding a funeral for the Professor.
• No Party Like a Donner Party: The family themselves are the subject of the second season finale.
• Not So Above It All: Ryan is almost always exasperated while listening to the musical numbers... but can't help openly enjoying a few.
  • He can't stop himself from bobbing his head a bit, quasi-dancing, to the upbeat, high-tempo Hatshepsut song.
  • Near the end of Horse's song in "The Great Molasses Flood," he actually bursts out laughing.
  • He snorts audibly and holds his face in his hand to repress his laughter at a couple points during the Infinitiger's song in Season Five, despite being especially unamused by the season's songs apart from it.
• Nuns Are Spooky: The subjects of "The Demonic Possessions of Loudun" are several nuns in a semi-isolated convent who are seemingly possessed by several demons.
• Obnoxious In-Laws: In "The Beast of Gevaudan," the Professor compares the titular beast to his mother-in-law, then admits he's not married. He just wanted to make a mother-in-law joke.
• Older Than They Look: Season 2 has started a running gag implying that the Professor is much older than he lets on. Later, it turns out that he's been using a time machine to see history first-hand, but he still looks pretty youthful for someone implied to be decently old.
• One-Steve Limit:
  • A Truth in Television aversion - "The Terrifying Eruption of Mt. Vesuvius" features Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger, and Plinia.
  • "Hatshepsut: The Forgotten Pharaoh" and America's First Black Aviatrix have Ryan Bergara competing against Ryann Graham.
  • The Kate Warne episode has Kate Peterman compete in it, but this goes unremarked upon.
• Patter Song: The mummified goose’s “Hatshepsut” number.
  • Happens again when the mummified goose returns and sings for the Christmas special.
• Ping Pong Naïveté: Whether the Professor is participating in the more adult humor that pops up in the show or innocently wondering what the guests are talking about in any given instance is solely dependent on Rule of Funny.
• Place Worse Than Death: The entire state of Florida, at least according to God. His song lists Florida (although separated into "Tampa" and "the rest of Florida") among all of the other plagues and catastrophes God has launched on the Earth.
• The Points Mean Nothing:
  • The main rule seems to be that Ryan never gets to win. Ryan even references Whose Line Is It Anyway?, complaining the Professor makes up points out of thin air. A common belief is that the Professor does it because of Ryan's constant antagonizing of him and kayfabe refusal to play along with the idea that Shane and the Puppets are to be treated separately.
  • Given the ending of the episode on Miyamoto Musashi, It's now entirely possible that The Professor is rigging the game to keep Ryan from being turned into a puppet by the jellybeans, given he knows how much Ryan loves jellybeans.
  • The Professor gives Ryan a “pun point” in “The Grisly Journey of the Donner Party.” It somehow does not count toward his actual point total, but it sure is neat.
  • Never has this been as prominent as The Story of St. Nicholas, as despite the points being tallied, The Coveted Cup isn't up for grabs since it's the Christmas special and The Professor doesn't even declare a winner in the end.
  • Also in the St. Nicholas episode, Kate gets a point for choosing the “long-winded genie poppycock” answer since no one before her had ever played along with The Professor's genie story.
  • Starting in season three, the point totals literally mean nothing as the Professor cites a "complex victory algorithm" which determines who wins, regardless of who earned more points during the episode. The fifth season's "The Defenestrations of Prague" reveals that he is not kidding about the algorithm - he has a full-on fancy machine running on it that he uses to calculate the winner; points are just, evidently, indeed not super-important to it.
• Pre-Asskicking One-Liner: From "The Dreadful Demise of the Dinosaurs": "Class dismissed, you little blue ball sack." Cue Holo-Professor getting thrown out the Example Window.
• Pride Before a Fall: Any time Ryan does well points-wise, expect him to get cocky and squander his lead.
• Rearrange the Song: The song in "The Dreadful Demise of the Dinosaurs" revolves around the melody of "Asmodeus" from "The Posessions of Loudun".
• Red Filter of Doom: Due to the Professor's limited facial mobility, the lighting in the puppet theater usually turns red to express when he's angry.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Miyamoto Musashi's oars are even color-coded appropriately in the Christmas episode, in which the "chill" one wears a scarf with blue stripes, whereas the one who was made into a sword and came to relish in being a Blood Knight wears one with red checks.
• Rewatch Bonus: In the fourth season, during the Puppet Pop-Ins, someone (later revealed to be the Horse from the third season finale) is always trying to disrupt the connection between the guest and The Professor, though it is unclear what they are trying to say at first. However on rewatch, in "Jose Rizal: The Philippines' Reluctant Revolutionary," the Horse can be heard (through the link's disruptions) saying something akin to "Don't trust Ryan Bergara and his friend Asmodeus." This actually foreshadows the twist in the finale.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter:
  • The Professor is a small, fluffy, muppetesque creature wearing an adorable little explorer outfit (and, on one occasion, a gymnast uniform!)
  • The wheat from "The Great Emu War" is regarded the same, and is made deliberately cute and agreeable to lull the viewer into a false sense of security before the Emu eats it.
• Right Through the Wall: After Musashi's oars sing their love duet, they end up furiously making out with each other. The curtain then closes, and when the Professor pops back up, he comments on how "hot and heavy" things are getting between the oars, and we then hear the sound of wood scraping against wood.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: The titular subject of the episode "The Bloody Revenge of Saint Olga of Kiev" pulls off a truly epic one against the Drevlians after their murder of her husband, Igor of Kiev.
• Rule of Three: Garrick lampshades this trope by name when Musashi bests the third Yoshioka clan samurai by arriving early to their duel and ambushing him. “You gotta do something different on the third!”
• Running Gag:
  • If both contestants choose B for a multiple-choice answer, the Professor calls them “B-Boys.” If both contestants choose C for a multiple-choice answer, the Professor calls them “C-Dogs” and won't move on until they have barked to his satisfaction.
  • Starting in Season Two, when Covid necessitated the switch to "Puppet University Online," the guests have to leave the room to collect their trophy. Whenever this happens, the instant they're gone, Ryan and the Professor will start getting into it.
  • Also beginning in Season Two, establishing shots will often have the phrase "Phosphorus fucked here" somewhere on a building, stemming from an actual piece of graffiti from the Roman era discussed in the Mt. Vesuvius episode.
  • Whenever Isaac Newton's name is mentioned in his eponymous episode, a graphic is shown of the great philosopher getting conked on the head with an apple, culminating with a giant one dropping on him at the end.
  • Whenever rations get mentioned in the Donner Party episode, the Professor imagines they’re Slim Jims and M&Ms.
  • Season Two has constant mentions of the Professor's Jerk Ass Genie nemesis as an option during multiple choice segments. It's to the point where, in "The Grisly Journey of the Donner Party", the option for it merely says "A long-winded genie anecdote" while the Professor rambles for half a minute.
• The Scapegoat: Mentioned regarding Marie Antoinette. While rich and spoiled, she was Misblamed in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, and both Ryan and Kate admire her for instilling boundaries when a jeweler tried guilting her about how he was going to commit suicide.
• Sanity Slippage Song:
  • The song the train sings in the episode about Kate Warne. It ends with the train sobbing and not wanting to sing anymore.
  • Happens again to the Olympic Torch in 1904 Olympics episode, and it gets lampshaded by a concerned Ryan.
  Ryan: Every one of his songs this season has had his characters have an existential crisis in the middle of the song!
• Self-Deprecation: On Shane's part, the final episode of Season 4 has The Professor preface his summary of the Loudoun possessions with confidence that he won't let his story end like "some other lame shows that leave things unsolved".
• Sexy Priest: In "Stealing The World's Most Expensive Necklace", Ryan comments that the quoted description of Cardinal Rohan sounds almost erotic, and the Professor jokes he had to excise frequent instances of the word "yum".
• Shout-Out:
  • A two-fer when The Professor tries to impersonate Abraham Lincoln in the Kate Warne episode.
    Ryan: Oh, he’s going Daniel Day-Lewis Lincoln.
    Kate Peterman: He sounds like Voldemort. “Come, Nagini!”
  • Ryan gets a “rotten jellybean” for quoting Borat during the Hatshepsut episode. The episode also sees references to Kanye West’s “Monster”, Coco, The Boss Baby, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Mad Men (special appearance by Don Draper himself).
  • Kate Peterman's sentence mixup in "The Great Emu War" makes Ryan comment that she sounds like she's making up her own version of the Winter Soldier's activation phrases.
  • "Olga of Kiev" has Ryan question, based on everything he knows so far, if the party Olga's about to invade with her troops is going to be a Russian Red Wedding. The song at the end of the episode also includes lyrics about how if you cross Olga, "she'll slit your throat like that one scene/In Gone Girl, know which one we mean?/Where NPH is - well, you get the gist".
  • As his prize for winning History Master at the end of "How Hippo Meat Almost Saved America", the Professor gives Ryan a bottle of lotion and promptly begins urging him to "put it on the skin".
  • While detailing Abraham Lincoln's inauguration tour, "America's First Female Detective" has a graphic that says "Honest Abe's Magical Choo-Choo Tour". He's even turned into a walrus.
  • Several songs throughout the show draw clear inspirations from various musical artists.
    • "Elroy Squirt III" from the Ziryab episode calls to mind The Beatles' "I Am The Walrus" with its Word Salad lyrics and Shane's best John Lennon impression. The graphics are even wearing outfits that resemble Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
    • "Bye Bye Juice" from the Affair of the Poisons episode is one to The Beastie Boys.
    • "Pieces Of Me" from the Isaac Newton episode is tribute to Randy Newman, one perhaps so obvious that Ryan identifies it immediately.
• Something Person: In the Hatshepsut episode, Ryan hated being called "Arby's" so much, he settled with the nickname "Beef Man." It soon evolved into "Beef Boy," which he disliked almost as much as "Arby's" but seems to have accepted, as it's persisted through subsequent seasons.
• Southern Belle: Shane and Kate Peterman give Kate Warne an exaggerated Southern accent. Kate even refers to herself as a fancy lady!
• Spinning Paper: In "Surviving the Titanic." The Professor has to ask it to stop spinning so he can finish his story.
• Squee: Kate Peterman on the necklace episode says she hasn’t had this much fun in ages and is delighted by Shane’s song at the end.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: The oars on Miyamoto Musashi's boat. Their song "Gore on the Shore" is an emotional ballad about how they were once in a passionate relationship, but now that one of the oars has been converted into a sword, they can no longer work in tandem like they once did. They do make out at the end of the song, though, and "The Story Of St. Nicholas" reveals that the two of them were able to work things out and are traveling the world together as lovers.
• Stealth Insult: While congratulating each episode's History Master, the Professor throws inevitable loser Ryan a "Ryan, thanks for trying!" At the end of "The Great Emu War" after telling Ryan he might have come closer to winning than usual, he changes that to "Ryan, thanks for trying - and I mean that this time!"
• Stunned Silence: In "The Beast of Gevaudan," when the Professor reveals that even after the titular beast was apparently killed on the order of Louis XV, it kept plaguing the countryside for eighteen more months and killed 30-35 more people, Ryan is momentarily lost for words.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: In "The Dreadful Demise of The Dinosaurs", the Hologram-Professor may be full of bloodlust and be fighting like hell against Ryan.....but it's still a half corporeal 'puppet'. Ryan easily overpowers him and throws him around, with the only real issue being the hologram continually popping back up after he's seemingly down
• Suspiciously Specific Denial:
  • Jeanne’s representative puppet was used to represent an American in a different scene where Violet was supposed to serve her as a ship stewardess. Violet complimented her, saying she liked her old style and that she definitely wasn’t a reused puppet.
  • The puppet representation of the Guaduas junta in the Policarpa episode is definitely not made up of reused puppets from earlier in the season.^note Despite their leader clearly being Hatshepsut.
• Take That!:
  • In his song at the end of "The Dancing Plague", God himself insists that the titular plague isn't the worst thing he's responsible for, citing things including "Tampa, Florida, and also the rest of Florida".
  • Due to the pandemic, the second season is "Puppet History Online University," with the guests participating from home via webcam.
    The Professor: It's like the University of Phoenix, except you might actually learn something.
  • When the Professor talks about a man being locked up in the Bastille in "The Affair of the Poisons", Ryan expresses surprise that "Bastille" is actually a word and can refer to something other than "a shitty band".
  • In "The War for the Golden Stool," The Professor asks if either of the contestants has seen Avatar: The Last Airbender. When Ryan asks if he was talking about the M. Night Shyamalan movie, the Professor starts visibly seething with rage.
  • "Ziryab: The World's First Rock Star" contains a few.
    • At one point, the characters break for a while to bash The Rise of Skywalker and criticize Poe Dameron's role in that film.
    • The Professor describes Ziryab's path to becoming his day's equivalent to an influencer as similar to Harry Styles, saying that getting all the way there would take more credentials than his ability to perform as a musical artist, like style, charisma, and "an underwhelming role in Dunkirk".
    • Towards the end of the episode, the Professor admits that some of the recorded details of Ziryab's life have likely been exaggerated and mythologized, but points out that that's par for the course with celebrities and that people find it's fun anyway to believe things like that Richard Gere likes gerbils or "that Ellen DeGeneres cares about other people".
• Tempting Fate: The Professor's frequent declarations of "I'm gonna live forever!" or some variant of the phrase, especially in the fourth season. At the end of said season, he is "canonically dead."
• That Came Out Wrong:
  • After the Randy Newman-style song at the end of "Isaac Newton's Nemesis", Ryan asks if the real Randy Newman is still alive.
    Keith: I don't know!
    Ryan: I hope not.
    [Canned audience gasp.]
    Ryan: I mean I hope he is, but -
    Keith: "I hope not"?! Jesus, Ryan!
    Ryan: I hope not in the sense that he would never have to see that!
  • In "The Great Emu War", Ryan states that he doesn't like movies with "4D" gimmicks because "they usually get me wet".
    [Beat.]
    Kate: …What?
    Ryan: Not in that sense! You sicko!
• Toilet Humor:
  • In the Kate Warne episode, Kate Peterman and Ryan get sidetracked talking about how "steamer" is slang for a hot poop when the Professor is trying to discuss steamboats.
  • In "The War of the Golden Stool", when the Professor explains that the British imposed taxes on the Ashanti people and Kate asks if it was part of a scheme to get ahold of the stool in question, Ryan quips that "a big stool can be taxing".
• Trademark Favorite Food: The Professor's jellybeans, though he never actually eats them himself on screen—he gives them to his guests.
  Ryan: I love jellybeans!
  The Professor: [fondly] I know.
  • The Professor also notes that while he eats plenty of jellybeans off screen, they can't account for his entire diet. This leads into him revealing his second favorite food, spiders.
• Unexplained Recovery: Garrick is fine at the start of “The Affair of the Poisons" following the Gainax Ending of "The World's Greatest/Rudest Samurai”.
• Unsound Effect: When the human remains-filled Donner Lake snowman chatters his teeth during his song at the end of "The Grisly Journey of the Donner Party", it's subtitled with "(unpleasant bone sounds)".
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Shane's excited exclamation that The Professor was back "in the flesh" is what set off Season 5's Hologram Professor's maniacal need for a human suit
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: A Game Show variant. As of Season 2, the professor instated a "rotten jelly bean" system where overly inappropriate quips and intentional antagonism can net a contestant a "rotten" history point that's worth negative points. Ryan's kayfabe antagonism has cost him the Coveted Cup of the History Master several times.
• Villain Song: The penultimate episode of season 5 has one for the holo Professor.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Just like every other time they work together, Ryan and Shane can't resist taking the piss out of each other. The Professor singles Ryan out for torment, and Ryan doesn't hesitate to fire back. Despite this, it's obvious how close they are.
• Vocal Evolution: In the first season, the Professor's voice sounds the same as Shane's narrations in Ruining History. In the second season, Shane has developed more of a unique voice for the character.
• We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties:
  • Shane is a tall man in a cramped space operating a puppet theater for the first time, so plenty of invokedbloopers occur. A screen with a neon glitched Professor’s face pops up occasionally when that happens.
  • Occurs twice in Stealing The World's Most Expensive Necklace. First when Ryan mishears "seating charts" as "seeding charts," leading the Professor and special guest Kate Peterman to freak out until the Technical Difficulties screen restores order. The second incident happens during the paper doll re-enactment of a meeting between Jeanne and Rohan, wherein the paper doll of Rohan is accidentally swapped out for a paper doll of Marie Antoinette.
  • These became a Running Gag in the Mt. Vesuvius episode not because of actual mishaps but because the Professor was acting a lot more manic than usual.
  • Again was one in the Olympic Marathon episode, also due to various non-accidental events: one after the Professor goads Vladimir Putin to come at him, one after he threatens Ryan to continue insulting his intelligence, one after being reminded of not being able to ride on anything at Disneyland due to his height.
  • Yet another one appears to give the Professor a moment in "America vs. Smallpox" when he starts crying over being under a lot of pressure after it seems he's accidentally hurt Ryan and Jermaine's feelings by gleefully eviscerating their responses to a quiz question they didn't realize wasn't supposed to have a right answer.
  • A technical difficulties screen pops up to interrupt the Professor in "The Vietnamese Sisters Who Fought an Empire" when he starts asking Ryan and Maya if they would ever kill their own children.
• Wham Episode:
  • The Demonic Possessions of Loudon episode has Asmodeus possess the Professor in order to rescind his previous wishes and make a new wish where the Professor would be transported to the Cretaceous Period, resulting him being canonically killed.
  • "The Bloody Life of England's Fastest Surgeon" : Ryan passes out after taking this episode's prize (a ether laced vape) and awakens tied up by the Professor, who it turns out, is the hologram Professor from the Professor's memorial, obsessed with becoming real and planning to steal Ryan's flesh to wish for it to be so with the Genie.
• Wham Shot:
  • The Donner Party episode reveals that the Professor had in fact found and summoned a genie at some point in time, and the genie... looks like Shane in a genie Halloween costume.
  • The Molasses Flood episode reveals that the genie might actually be the good guy in trying to hunt down the Professor, as his trip through time had untold consequences, including the transformation of the musical guests into the puppets they now are.
  • In "The Defenestration of Prague", The Professor not only USING the "complex victory algorithim" and glitching out upon Ryan not winning but.....something in a tree branch when the Professor is discussing being thrown out a window.
• Who Would Be Stupid Enough?: In the Miyamoto Musashi episode, Ryan expresses disbelief that a rival clan really kept using the same strategy against him even after he kept killing all their men, asking if anyone could possibly be that dumb. And... yes, yes, they could.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: The Professor is very afraid of cats. Except Sara's cat, whom he considers to be a handsome fella.
• The World Is Just Awesome: During the song at the end of "The Dreadful Demise of the Dinosaurs" the Meteor marvels at the beauty of Earth.
• Worth It: At one point in the Olympic episode, Ryan gets the Professor mad and in turn gets one rotten jelly bean. Instead of stopping, Ryan taunts the Professor into giving him another one.
• Would Hurt a Child: Miyamoto Musashi ends up wiping out an entire clan single-handedly, and dealt its finishing blow by killing the 12 year-old son of the clan's second leader, something the cast repeatedly riffs on. The Professor does note that this at least made sense as Musashi himself won his first duel to the death when he was a child, albeit to an opponent who was not as prepared to kill him.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: Over the course of "The Story of St. Nicholas", the Professor is unusually friendly and lenient towards Ryan. He even awards him a bonus point for making a pun (albeit it's a "pun point", previously established as not counting) despite it being at the expense of one of the guest singers he himself only ever has praise for - before turning around and giving Kate a rotten jellybean for sucking up to him. By the end of the episode, Ryan has racked up the most points… but the Professor decides to forego naming a History Master in favor of giving the contestants their Christmas presents. Kate opens hers up and receives a cute little tree ornament book of Shakespeare quotes that endears her into Tears of Joy before an already unamused Ryan reveals that he's gotten a miniature $100 bill.
• You Must Be This Tall to Ride: The Professor doesn't like when Ryan starts talking about Disneyland because the Professor is too short to go on any of the rides.

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"Thank you for watching Puppet History, where the details are always a little fuzzy!"