Though Karagöz always outmatches Hacivat's superior education with his "native wit," he is also very impulsive and his never-ending deluge of get-rich-quick schemes always results in failure.

Some believe that it originates from the island of Java where shadow puppet shows (wayang kulit) were played already as early as in the 11th century and arrived in the Ottoman Empire via traders.

In the 16th century, Ottoman Grand Mufti Muhammad Ebussuud el-İmadi issued a celebrated opinion allowing the performance of Karagöz plays.

Rather than simply making a complaint, as most commoners did, he put on a short puppet show to tell a tale about the sultan's corrupt officials.

Eventually, however, the puppets began to face repression from Ottoman authorities, up until the founding of the Turkish Republic, when Karagöz had become almost entirely unrecognizable from its original form.

[4] Before the twentieth century, many Karagöz performers were Jews, who had an active presence in popular Ottoman art forms ranging from music to theater.

They had movable limbs and were jointed with waxed thread at the neck, arms, waist and knees and manipulated from rods in their back and held by the finger of the puppet master.

[3][1] The Karagöz theatre consisted of a three sided booth covered with a curtain printed with branches and roses and a white cotton screen, of about three feet by four, which was inserted in the front.

[3][1] Characters in these plays are the drunkard Tuzsuz Deli Bekir with his wine bottle, the long-necked Uzun Efe, the opium addict Kanbur Tiryaki with his pipe, Altı Kariş Beberuhi (an eccentric dwarf), the half-wit Denyo, the spendthrift Civan, and Nigâr, a flirtatious woman.

There may also be dancers and djinns, and various portrayals of non-Turks: an Arab who knows no Turkish (typically a beggar or sweet-seller), a black servant woman, a Circassian servant girl, an Albanian security guard, a Greek (usually a doctor), an Armenian (usually a footman or money-changer), a Jew (usually a goldsmith or scrap-dealer), a Laz (usually a boatman), or an Iranian (who recites poetry with an Azeri accent).

The Greek version characters have been altered or altogether introduced: the Pasha, the daughter of the Vezir (both representing the state, the latter being very beautiful and courted unsuccessfully by Karagöz (Karagiozis)), Barba-Giorgos (the rustic Roumeliot shepherd who acts as an uncle to Karagöz), the Morfonios (dandy) with an enormous nose (adapted from a previous Ottoman character), Velingekas (the policeman who represents the Ottoman state following his own macho honor code) as well as innovations such as Stavrakas (the Piraeot Rebet, a tough character) and his Rebetiko band, Nionios from Zante, Manousos the Cretan, Solomon the Jew (adapted from the Ottoman character), Aglaia, wife of Karagöz, his ever hungry three boys Kollitiri, Svouras, and Birikokos, among others.

[1] Karagöz and Hacivat has also been adapted to other media, such as the 2006 Turkish film Killing the Shadows, directed by Ezel Akay.

[10] Due to the popularity of the plays in 19th-century Romania, today caraghios (feminine: caraghioasă, with variants caraghioz, caraghioază) has come to mean "ridicule, comical" in Romanian.