I found the text to the “plays” (!) on Project Gutenberg, and am enjoying reading them. It isn’t hard for me to make up music in my mind for those songs I don’t actually know the music for. Studying the poetry is utterly jolly.
So: Dick Deadeye. He’s so ugly, everybody hates him. Is that the joke?
Is there anything more to it than this? It seems to me like I’m missing something. He says the same things everyone else is saying, but everybody hates him for it?
Keep reading:
“From such a face and form as mine the noblest sentiments sound like the black utterances of a depraved imagination. It’s human nature — I am resigned.”
So, that’s what’s going on? He does say the same thing everyone else says, but they reject it from him because he’s ugly?
I guess this is one of those bits I’d have to see performed to understand.
(I have a copy of the Dick Deadeye book with illustrations by Ronald Searle. Lots of fun, but very difficult to make much sense of.)
Yes, that’s exactly it. Dick Deadeye can’t even announce that water is wet without everyone recoiling in horror, scolding him, and making signs against the evil eye. There’s no rhyme or reason to it other than “This is the running gag about how everyone reacts to everything Dick Deadeye says or does”.
I agree that it works better in performance than on the page.
This may help: I saw a production once in which every time the man’s name was mentioned seagulls started to scream and one of the chorus members fainted.
It is a sendup of the idea common in Victorian literature that how a person looks or dresses indicates the state of his or her soul, good or bad. Ruddigore with despard and robin slash Ruthven does the same basic thing.
Ah! Okay, got it. I was halfway intuiting this, but it kept feeling wrong to me. Thank you!
That makes sense. (A lack I will have to make up some day!)
Okay, that’s funny! (Makes me think of “Blucher” in Young Frankenstein!)
Haven’t got to Ruddigore yet, but looking forward. I am absolutely adoring the intricate word-play, and most especially rhymes that are broken over words in two lines.
(Also sad that our own age hasn’t outgrown dramatic signalling of character by obvious physical clues. We may not use “black cowboy hats” to indicate villains – but we do still see “black street punk” or “arabic terrorist” stereotypes in movies. It’s lazy writing, and also dates a work.)
(W.S. Gilbert did use “types” for character, of course – fairies and sea-captains and bone-headed bureaucrats, but he was clever enough to use enduring images and characters: a land of fairies works as well today as it did 140 years ago, and seamen and sea captains haven’t changed all that much either.)
Yes, but it’s a not just Victorian literature – it’s melodramatic plays in general, where the villain comes on stage twirling his moustache and swirling his cape, and is promptly booed and hissed by the audience. I don’t have a cite, but I assume that this goes back to Punch and Judy shows. G&S are spoofing this.
It’s just all the more surreal because D.D. isn’t a bad guy! What he says is sensible, and he even makes himself likeable when he says how he’s resigned to his fate.
Of course, were he in the room with me, I’d boo and hiss him: it seems he has an anti-empathic projective telepathy super-weakness!