10
Popular Culture Review
already a dress like a pirate day. It’s called Halloween. There
became this expectation that we were the pirate guys and we’d
“Arrr!” and all that stuff so we had to [dress like pirates].
(Baur, Interview)
He did note that, one of the benefits of having to dress like pirates was that
his costume is all tax deductible.
The edge of pretending can be reached in ways other than stealing
someone’s boat, or legitimately threatening someone with a cutlass. It can also
be taken to an extreme when the pretend becomes real. Cap’n Slappy describes
one such surreal experience where the pretend has real world implications. He
said that he once got a phone call to do an interview with the Wall Street Journal
about piracy. He said, “It’s insane and they were talking about the real pirates in
Somalia and asking me for my take on this. And I was like, ‘Why?’ ‘Who reads
this?’ You’re the Wall Street Journal” (Summers). While the article in question
did not mistakenly take him for an expert on the situation of piracy in Somalia, it
is interesting that what started out as a joke and a performance, has now turned
into a form of real world respectability.
6. Play
As has been mentioned earlier. Pirates are very big in popular culture. There
are various reasons for this of course, but one of the most obvious is that the
character of a pirate is larger than life and has a freedom that ordinary people do
not have. Ol’ Chumbucket suggests:
So they are that iconic image and they are blustering,
swaggering. They live life by their own rules and in our
society today, there’s not a lot of room for that. We are
constantly told by every media message we get about how we
should look and how we should act and what you have to do
to be cool. And pirates didn’t give a damn what anyone else
thought of their behavior. (Baur, Interview)
There is a freedom in the spirit of the camivalesque where we can escape
from and overturn the rules of society for a time. In laying out his theory of the
camivalesque, Bakhtin states, “As opposed to the official feast, one might say
that carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from
the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank,
privileges, norms, and prohibitions” (10). Part of the pleasure and enjoyment of
comedy is found precisely in this subversion or flaunting of the mles. Umberto
Eco states of the camivalesque and comedy, “One must know to what degree
certain behaviors are forbidden, and must feel the majesty of the forbidding
norm, to appreciate their transgression” (6). Pirates can get away with all sorts
of inappropriate behavior. Only on Talk Like a Pirate Day can 1 call my wife a
“wench” or “me proud beauty” without having to walk the plank myself