Sunday Pages: "Oh, better far to live and die"
A song by Gilbert & Sullivan
Tragedy ages better than comedy. Shakespeare’s sober soliloquys continue to soar, while his jokes—no doubt riotous in Elizabethan London—fail to land. Woe keeps, like whiskey; humor skunks, like beer. How did Morrissey put it? That joke isn’t funny anymore. (Morrissey also isn’t funny anymore, but that’s neither here nor there.)
This may be because the best comedy pushes the boundaries, and the boundaries in 2023 are well beyond what they were in 1593. It may be because comedy evolves while tragedy is static. How many gut-busting jokes from the early 20th century are not funny as much as mean-spirited? How many comedies can we no longer watch without being conscious of the latent misogyny, homophobia, or racism in the humor? (Looking at you, Breakfast at Tiffany’s.) How much material from current comics and podcasters enjoyed by MAGA-minded dudes relies on these things, or laments the evolution of empathy, and rages against “cancel culture?”
An exception is the work of Gilbert and Sullivan, especially Pirates of Penzance—my favorite thing of all time ever. I love it more than any movie, any TV show, any album: anything. The comic opera was written, somehow, in 1879, and yet remains funny. Although W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan were British, this particular work was written and first performed in New York. (Their popular previous effort, H.M.S. Pinafore, was often performed illegally, using pirated copies of the music and lyrics and thus denying them royalty money, so they had pirates on the brain.) The cleverness and absurdity and brilliance of Pirates continues to blow my mind, almost 40 years after my first exposure to it: playing viola in the pit during a fantastic summer production just before freshman year of high school. (Senior year, when my high school again put on the show, I played the Major-General. It is delightful, I assure you, to spend the entire second act in a fancy bathrobe.)
“Oh, better far to live and die” is better known as the Pirate King’s Song. It occurs early in the first act, introducing the compelling and scene-stealing eponymous character, and like all great comedy, it’s short and sweet:
Oh, better far to live and die
Under the brave black flag I fly,
Than play a sanctimonious part,
With a pirate head and a pirate heart.
Away to the cheating world go you,
Where pirates all are well-to-do;
But I’ll be true to the song I sing,
And live and die a Pirate King.
For I am a Pirate King!
And it is, it is a glorious thing
To be a Pirate King!
For I am a Pirate King!
(You are! Hurrah for our Pirate King!)
And it is, it is a glorious thing
To be a Pirate King.
(It is! Hurrah for our Pirate King!
Hurrah for the Pirate King!)
When I sally forth to seek my prey,
I help myself in a royal way.
I sink a few more ships, it’s true,
Than a well-bred monarch ought to do;
But many a king on a first-class throne,
If he wants to call his crown his own,
Must manage somehow to get through
More dirty work than ever I do.
For I am a Pirate King!
And it is, it is a glorious thing
To be a Pirate King!
For I am a Pirate King!
(You are! Hurrah for our Pirate King!)
And it is, it is a glorious thing
To be a Pirate King.
(It is! Hurrah for our Pirate King!
Hurrah for the Pirate King!)
The genius lies in how Gilbert, the lyricist, quickly and ruthlessly points out the hypocrisy, skewering the moneyed class. In the civilized world, he correctly notes, “pirates all are well-to-do.” This characterization does not restrict itself to sea-based brigands. Any rich, powerful, greedy bastard (including those who possess very nice boxes at the opera house where the show was performed) fits the bill. But it is historical fact that in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries, actual pirates were made respectable by society. They had a different name: privateers. But they were bona fide pirates, sanctioned by the Crown.
Say what you will about the Pirate King; at least he doesn’t pretend to be something he’s not, unlike some people we might mention. In that way, the King of the Pirates is more honest than any member of polite society—and, for all his buccaneering, does less harm, in the big picture, than any legit monarch.
The music is rollicking and fun, and I love the ironically dumb rhyme of king and thing in the chorus—this from the wordsmith who rhymes “a lot o’ news” with “hypotenuse” later in the show. This is my favorite recording:
It feels almost disrespectful, after such a bleak week, to write about comedy. But the ability to laugh, to find and savor the humor in the day-to-day of life, is essential to our humanity. As the playwright George Bernard Shaw once remarked, “Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.”
Comedy helps us process sadness. Laughter is—it is!—a glorious thing.
ICYMI
On The Five 8 this week, we broke down the Hamas attacks and the situation in Israel from several different angles, including the spiritual. Our guests were the retired Rev. Jeff Black and his wife, Barbara—LB’s lovely parents—who shared with us their wisdom and taught us how to safeguard our spirit.
On the subject of comedy, we made this Five 8 karaoke, which was inspired by this story in the New York Times:
Recording the song and playing it over and over helped keep me grounded this week. (And yes, that is a much younger Yours Truly in the photo, channeling my inner Caesar Augustus.)
Photo credit: GS Archive. Image of Henry Lytton as the Pirate King denouncing the Major General (C. H. Workman) in The Pirates of Penzance, 1909.
Yes. I am grateful for a sense of humor every day. It's a blessing that sociopaths clearly lack.
One reason to think about the Roman Empire is how it arose from the Roman Republic it destroyed. Following the final Roman victory in the Third Punic War, Rome was the strongest power around, an empire in all but name outside its borders. The attempt to remain a Republic domestically while being an empire internationally created a tension that took about 245 years to reconcile. Those making money from the Empire became increasingly unwilling to put up with the restrictions of the Republic and bought and paid for those willing to knock it down. Those who represented the people not getting rich from the Empire sought to maintain the Republic by keeping the Empire under control, with intermittent success.
Eventually the corruption of the Republic created by the ones getting rich from the Empire led to its increasing dysfunction and the common people wanted to Make It Stop. They supported Julius Caesar, who was both successful militarily and a successful political populist. Most people with at least a semi-education beyond public school know the basics of the rest of that story.
The story of Rome has much to do with the story of the United States, since the Founders were all readers of Polybius, who had outlined the strengths of the Roman Republic that allowed it to fight and win the Punic Wars despite much travail in the process (in the First Punic War the Roman army was defeated by Hannibal every year for ten years. The Romans raised a new army every year regardless; the army raised in the 11th year defeated Hannibal.) The founders thus formally adopted the structure of the Roman Republic, since it was the longest-lived Republic, in hopes the problems of that system would be dealt with successfully by people of virtue, people like the Romans who won the Punic Wars.
The Second World War was our Punic Wars and the American republic became an empire internationally while attempting to remain a republic domestically. Like Rome, those making money from the Empire have become increasingly unwilling to accept the restrictions of the Republic. In our case it didn't take 245 years, since it no longer takes six months for the memo to reach all interested parties for a decision to be made. We're at the point Cicero wrote about where the corruption and rot started to become obvious. It's been done within the lifetime of a person (me) born on the high tide of the American Republic, the year America liberated the world.
So yeah, there's a lot of reason to look to the Roman example. To me, it's for lessons of what not to do. The old Roman republicans saw the problem and the solution, but weren't strong enough to execute it. We need to smack down the oligarchs making money from the Empire and destroy their power if we want to keep a Republic.