Popular Culture Review
numerous pirate-themed sports franchises, pirate re-enactors, pirate museums,
and pirate history tours. While these and many other explorations of pirates are
serious in nature, often the pirate or the pirate story is situated within what
Northrop Frye would call the comic mode (43-52). Several other art works,
particularly in plays and film, fall into this group including: Gilbert and
Sullivan’s play The Pirates o f Penzance, and films such as Blackbeard's Ghost
(1968), The Pirate Movie (1982), Yellowbeard (1983), The Goonies (1985),
Pirates (1986), The Princess Bride (1987), and Muppet Treasure Island (1996).
Others, such as the recent Pirates o f the Caribbean (2003-2011) series, seem to
straddle the world of action and comedy. Pirates also appear online in various
formats including homemade and professional videos, music, and pictures. You
can even change your Google or Facebook language to “Pirate.” Since no one
actually speaks “Pirate” and thus this “language” has no practical value, it is also
clearly situated in the comic mode.
2. Provenance
Where did Talk Like a Pirate Day come from? I spoke with Mark Summers
(Cap’n Slappy) and Jon Baur (OF Chumbucket) and asked them. Cap’n Slappy
said:
It’s the only holiday we know that started as a sporting injury .
.. My friend John Baur, 01’ Chumbucket, and I were playing
racquetball one day and one of us, (we don’t remember which
one of us) but one of us let out an “Arrr!” in pain and from
that point on it just kind of triggered other kinds of pirate talk
during the racquetball game. A hard shot we’d say, ‘Aye that
was a fine cannonade. You slapped that one off the mizenmast
matey.’ (Summers)
01’ Chumbucket went on to say, “by the time the game was over, we
realized we had much more fun talking like pirates than we ever did playing
racquetball and we decided the world needed a holiday for every man, woman,
and child on the planet who was not just allowed, but encouraged to talk like
pirates” (Baur, Interview). The story of how they came up with the date for Talk
Like a Pirate Day is also worthy of note, largely because it is just quirky enough
that it helps lend to the fascination with the whole event. The date of the
racquetball game was June 6. According to 01’ Chumbucket, they decided that
since June 6 was D-day it was “sort of a sacred day so you don’t want to mar it
with something as meaningless as Talk Like a Pirate Day” (Baur, Interview).
According to Cap’n Slappy, “we settled on September 19th because I was
recently divorced and it was my ex-wife’s birthday and the date was stuck in my
head and I wasn’t doing anything with it anymore” (Summers). They chose it as
a date they thought they could remember and thus began Talk Like a Pirate Day.
The holiday was low key initially with very few practitioners. Cap’n Slappy
describes it as, “The first five or six years of this Talk Like a Pirate Day was Jon