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PaperclipPerfector
1d ago
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Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Lately I've been listening to The Mikado, so of course I was very amused to see @Celestial-body-NOS's recent comment referencing it. But this got me thinking about the place of Gilbert & Sullivan culturally, and how much it has changed over my lifetime.
In the 90's it was very common to see Gilbert & Sullivan referenced. In The Simpsons you had Sideshow Bob routinely breaking into a G&S song. The Mikado was referenced in Seinfeld as something Jerry's cousin was in a production of. Other shows as well like Frasier and Cheers referenced it repeatedly. I get the sense that Gilbert & Sullivan was still extremely popular as sort of "Ivy League Humor" as late as the 1990s. Obviously most of these characters like Sideshow Bob were supposed to be pretentious, but at the same time the shows clearly expected the audience to recognize the reference. The audience might not know all the words like Sideshow Bob, but getting the joke requires recognizing the song to some extent. The joke wouldn't land if they were instead referencing some obscure medieval poem that would be completely unknown to the audience. I feel like it was sort of classified as pretentious but relatable, as in, if you were college educated in the 1990s you probably knew at least one friend that was way too into G&S.
Of course, needless to say I don't think it's that way anymore. I think amateur collegiate G&S productions were a staple of Ivy League college life, I mean you had Simpsons writers like Conan O'Brien that literally attended Harvard and was president of The Harvard Lampoon. When I was at college in the late 2000s I don't remember any of that. I think by then productions of G&S had largely been replaced by a capella groups and improv which share a lot of the same sensibilities but strip away any history or cultural tradition.
It makes me a bit sad and nostalgic. In a way it is very remarkable that operas from the 1880s still held any degree of currency in popular culture over 100 years later. I think it speaks to the aspirations of past generations that were still to some degree rooted in old aristocratic Victorian ideals. And I think it went along with a whole host of related ideals like reverence for Shakespeare and classical music and such, all as part of a package ideal of what the cultured intellectual looked like and I don't know that any of that has really survived to the present. It's not so much that G&S or Shakespeare would be frowned upon exactly, or read as gauche (though perhaps they would by some of the ultra-woke crowd), but more just that they aren't really a part of a culturally shared vision for what an intellectually developed person looks like anymore.
It does make me wonder, what do you think the image today of the "slightly pretentious but admirably cultured intellectual" looks like today, in the popular imagination? Do any fictional characters come to mind? What are the markers that would identify such a person most accurately?
Gilbert & Sullivan were everywhere when I was a kid, I still have I Am The Very Model of a Modern Major-General memorized, but I had no idea Americans had ever heard of it. Echo your sadness that the connection to the past has disappeared.
A scourge. I recall touring US colleges and every single one had a moment in the tour where they described their quiiiiiirky acapella group as if they were the only college that had thought to have it.
In the UK, a Daunt Books tote bag, New York Review of Books in the US. New Yorker for the person pretending to be such.
What? Of course Americans have heard of it! It's a popular stock parody. Just to name one example, xkcd's "Every Major's Terrible", which was later turned into a music video (Randall Munroe is, of course, American).
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