Gilbert and Sullivan/YMMV: Difference between revisions

** Really, there's at least one great song in every show. ''Pirates'' is particularly strong in this regard.

* [[Ear Worm]]: [[Ear Worm/Gilbert and Sullivan|Many]], though perhaps the most notorious is "Come, friends, who plough the sea," the chorus of "With cat-like tread," which has become well known in many variants (''e.g.'', "Hail, hail, the gang's all here").

* [[Fair for Its Day]]: The apparent [[Straw Feminist|anti-feminism]] in''Princess Ida'' is ''nothing'' compared to the genuine Anti-Feminist jokes of its time. The Tennyson poem it's based on is also arguably worse in many respects than Gilbert's parody, since the [[Framing Story]] basically claims it's an incompetent attempt by feminists to rewrite history, which ends up showing that a woman's place is with her man. In Gilbert's version, the worst you get is some ''characters'' poking fun of women's education -- before they get there, and all of whom think that educated women are ''fantastic'' once they meet them, skewering of some of the man-hating aspects of Ida's college, and a scene where book-learning meets reality, and the woman refuses to do surgery which she was taught to do from books alone. Plus, in Gilbert's other work, in ''Utopia, Limited'', the Cambridge-educated Princess Zara never has this poked fun of, and is shown to be vastly more capable than most of the men, so it's not like he makes a habit of anti-Feminism.

* [[Memetic Mutation]]: A notable [[Older Than Radio]] example is the "What, never?", "No, never", "What, never?" "Well, hardly ever."-exchange from ''H.M.S Pinafore''. The editor of a certain London newspaper is said to have threatened to sack any man on staff quoting the passage, his rant ending with "I never want to hear that joke again!". Cue everyone...

** ''The Mikado'' in particular is the source of many now-familiar English phrases, such as "a short, sharp shock," "Let the punishment fit the crime," and "grand Poohbah."

* [[Moe]]: Patience and Grosvenor in ''Patience''.

** Somewhat confusingly, if Gilbert wanted a word like "Navy", "Sympathy", or "Arcady" to rhyme with "bee", he always wrote it out as "Navee", "Sympathee", or "Arcadee". So, "I shall live and die" is meant to rhyme with "A heartfelt sympa-thigh", but "Stick close to your desks and never go to sea / And you all may be rulers of the Queen's Navee". It's Victorian! ''Iolanthe'' goes one step further:

{{quote| Strephon: A shepherd, I -<br />