(I’m playing catch-up here. I really like averaging one a week.)

Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody. By Carolyn Williams. Columbia University Press, 2011. 454 pages.

This is a slog through all the Humanities-hip academic aspects of what we must never forget was a mainstream pop culture comedy phenomenon. It gets as stodgy as seeing a Savoy show overdressed in an opera house. But at the same time, this book explained more of the lost jokes in Gilbert & Sullivan shows than did any of those scrapbook G&S-themed coffee table books which have proliferated over the years.
Carolyn Williams doesn’t just pontificate. She does her research, and is kind of a context detective, seriously wanting to know which elements of Gilbert & Sullivan were familiar to their audiences, which were subversive, which was smartly satirical and which were just silly.

She divides her interests cleanly into “Gender, Genre, Parody” and ably explains the terms at the outset. She uses plenty of photos and line drawings to aid her investigations into what made comic operas like The Sorcerer and H.M.S. Pinafore laugh riots in their time, and how they endure today.

It’s always dangerously annoying to put forth one’s views on why something is funny, but in some cases the exercise is valuable. It’s one thing to notice that The Grand Duke sounds like Offenbach; it’s another to accept it as a precise parody of The Gand Duchess of Gerolstein. Likewise, it’s worthwhile to dissect whether Patience is laughing at Oscar Wilde or using him as a handy icon for a more general joke about the cult of celebrity.

Williams’ gender-genre-parody ponderings can get pretentious, but that’s easily excused by the mass of information she unfurls. It’s like she’s used one of W.S. Gilbert’s patented magical cloaks or medicines on the century-old scripts to these oft-overformalized shows and let a Pandora’s box of itty-bitty, long-invisible yet indelible fringes of these scripts fly free, for our augmented amusement.