In 1852, Carl Reinhardt published a series of plays for Kasperl in addition to the illustrated plates which he was publishing at the time in the Münchner Bilderbogen. The text, whose authorship remains uncertain, serves as a caption to a graphic work which made Reinhardt the father of comics in Germany, and was certainly not written to be staged. Even so, these short sketches reproduce typical scenes and routines of the repertoire for glove-puppet of the time, with the characters being drawn most of the time from the waist up. The encounter with a mysterious animal provides an opportunity for a scenic game opposing the pliers formed by the animal’s mouth and the stick, or the club, which Kasperl inherited from Pulcinella. The animal itself is first identified as a nightingale and then as a crocodile. The German and Dutch traditions only retained the crocodile: this is notably true for the Munich theatre of Joseph Leonhard Schmid and his associate, writer Franz von Pocci.

After having locked the devil up in a box (in Kasperl und der Teufel), Kasperl wants to throw him in the water. Suddenly, it is his wife who emerges from the box… and who starts to slap him many times to take revenge, for he wanted to get rid of her (Frau Kasperl und die Köchin)! Kasperl ends up throwing both his wife and the box out of the glove-puppet booth, and then goes to the inn. On the way, he encounters a curious animal peeping at him; he pets the animal, which bites him. He fetches a sausage to feed the animal, but decides to eat it and gives the skin of the sausage to the animal. The animal catches Kasperl’s arm with its maw, then catches him by the back of his pants… Kasperl goes to get his stick, which the animal tries to steal from him; the animal gets beaten and runs away, followed by Kasperl who wants to knock it out.