Puppet Festival Judge Disqualified After It Emerges He Has Been a Puppet the Entire Time

The International Festival of Puppet Arts in Charleville-Mezieres has removed a member of its competition jury after fellow judges discovered that Monsieur Henri DuBois, who has served on the panel for seven consecutive years, is himself a puppet. The discovery was made during a deliberation session when judge Marguerite LeCroix noticed that DuBois had not blinked in approximately four hours. Closer inspection revealed a visible seam along his jawline, hinged joints at both elbows, and what LeCroix described as 'an overall woodenness that I had previously attributed to his personality.' 'In retrospect, there were signs,' LeCroix told reporters. 'He never ate lunch with us. He never went to the bathroom. He arrived at the beginning of each festival and left at the end, and in between, he sat perfectly still except when expressing an opinion, at which point his head would rotate smoothly to the left. I assumed he was just French.' DuBois, or rather the puppeteer operating DuBois, has not come forward. Investigators examined the judge's chair and found a small hole in the seat through which a rod mechanism had been threaded from beneath the judges' table. A trap door under the table leads to a crawlspace where, according to festival security, 'someone had been spending a lot of time.' The festival's artistic director, Jean-Claude Ficelle, called the situation 'embarrassing but, in a way, the highest compliment to the art form.' 'A puppet judged other puppets for seven years, and no one noticed,' Ficelle said. 'That is either a scandal or a masterpiece. I am still deciding which.' DuBois's past scores have been reviewed and found to be 'remarkably fair, with a slight but statistically significant bias toward rod puppets.' His scores will stand. The crawlspace has been sealed.