OK, I admit it. I don’t speak pirate myself, but I feel a real closeness to the pirate community. It all started in high school, when the vice-principal assigned me the locker next to David Jones, or “Davy,” as we called him.
I was so close to glory, yet you never hear a pirate say, “We sent ‘im to Davy Jones’s locker, which, by the way, is right next to Uncle Scoopy’s.”
I actually forgot to speak or write like a pirate last September 19. I’ve decided to spin my failure by saying that I chose to portray pirates as they really talked instead of creating some larger-than-life caricature. Just think of it in terms of Dennis Quaid playing Doc Holliday.
Long John Silver and Doc Holliday have something in common. They are roles that are more successful when overacted. Dennis Quaid portrayed Doc Holliday as a real person. Nobody wants to see that shit. That’s like portraying a medieval bridge-keeper without one decent riddle, or playing Richard III as a thoughtful man with perfect posture.
Or portraying a Yarrr-less pirate.
That reminds me of a story my sons told me. When they were kids, they watched some show about a local news announcer who had to fill in when the local kiddie-show guy got sick. He didn’t enjoy acting and he didn’t understand the characters. When he played Cap’n Jack the pirate he would just read the cue cards in his news-announcer voice. “Avast me hearties, it be time for a cartoon. Yar, kids.” (Just pronouncing “yar” to rhyme with “bar,” with no rolled “r.”) The part of the story I liked best was how he hosted the Horror Theater as Ghost Jack, reading his evil laugh off the cue cards in a flat, toneless voice as “Mewee, mewee, ma-ha-ha, kids.” I never saw that show, whatever it was, but I remember how much the kids and I loved to talk about it, and how we would make up other larger-than-life characters to be played by the substitute Something Jack: Cowboy Jack, Vampire Jack, Gabby Jack, Sonny Jack (who had a perfectly sensible appreciation of Cocoa Puffs), Jack the Tiger (“Frosted Flakes are great, I suppose. Well, let’s just say to be fair that they’re quite tasty, kids.”), Yosemite Jack, Jack Ventura (Pet Detective), etc.
Now that I think about it, I would love to see how Dennis Quaid would play Sonny the Cuckoo.
This is a day when we honor Robert Newton, essentially the inventor of pirate-speak as we now conceive of it.
Some four years after Treasure Island, Newton played Long John Silver again in the 1954 film Long John Silver, shot in Australia. The same production then made 26 half-hour episodes of The Adventures of Long John Silver, also starring Newton. Remarkably, they were filmed in color, even though few people owned color TVs at the time—and Australia itself didn’t even have television yet. If Wikipedia has the dates right, Newton was alive when the series began airing in the USA in 1955, but had passed away before it reached the UK in 1957, where he could play the part post-mortem. Death didn’t slow him in the least. Now that is commitment that even Daniel Day-Lewis could learn from.
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