The Pirates of Slaughterhouse-Five

There's one tiny, rather unimportant detail from Slaughterhouse-Five that I can't take my mind off of. It's near and dear to my heart, and while I know it doesn't matter to most of you, nor will you remember that it even happened, it's very important to me that you all receive the correct information. 

"Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here" is not a song from Pirates of Penzance. 

I know the chances of any of you remembering even reading those words are very low, which I understand. The majority of the world, unlike me, doesn't have an affinity for comic operas written in the 1800s. To be entirely fair, Pirates of Penzance is one of Gilbert and Sullivan's more famous operas. It's well known more in the theatre world than the non-theatre world, but if you've heard of Gilbert and Sullivan, Pirates is most likely the show you've heard of. And if you know any of the music, you probably know "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General." That song is particularly famous for its speed. There's a lot of lyrics crammed into a tempo that seems fine at first, but once you try to do it, it becomes increasingly difficult. Then to top it all off, there's a brief encore immediately afterward that's incredibly fast. It's very impressive and starts at 3:14 in the video. And not to flex or anything, but I can do that section of the song at full speed. 

Gilbert and Sullivan's songs have been parodied plenty. (Here's one of my favorites, a parody of "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General.") "I Am the Very Model" is probably the most parodied, but there's plenty of other parodies. Essentially, Gilbert and Sullivan's cultural influence was relatively large. They seriously changed musical theatre (Hamilton even references Pirates) and in general, because their work is in the public domain and well-known, it's easy to use/reference. As it turns out, "Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here" is a parody of a Gilbert and Sullivan song.

The song in question is "With Cat-Like Tread, Upon Our Prey We Steal." It's a deeply ironic song, which I think you can figure out quite easily just by watching the first minute or so. It's pretty indicative of what Pirates is as a whole: bizarre and absurd. 

I'm not going to explain all of Pirates to you here, but the important things you need to know for my sake are as follows: "With Cat-Like Tread" features the titular pirates, who are horrible at being pirates. Why? They let anyone who claims to be an orphan go free, for they themselves are orphans and pity other orphans. In "With Cat-Like Tread," they're doing a sneak attack on the Major-General as retribution for a lie he told. The local police force was preparing to arrest them, but hid upon hearing them arrive. The police force is equally terrible at their job. After one song detailing the gruesome deaths they will face while defeating the pirates, they get cold feet. But they weren't very brave in the first place.

So we have two groups of misfits trying to fulfill the roles assigned to them. It reminded me an awful lot of the American soldiers that simply don't fit into the army. They have exactly the same energy as the unconventional (and crappy) pirates and policemen of Pirates of Penzance. They can't do their jobs right, no matter how hard they try. Think of Billy, who is just a mess at everything he tries to do in the army (if you would even call what he does trying to do something). Or Roland Weary, who gave away his regiment's position and ended up getting them all killed. Even the Englishmen feel just a bit off in their roles as prisoners. 

I doubt Vonnegut was trying to reference these complexities of Pirates of Penzance when he had the Englishmen march out of their shed singing "Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here." He was most likely just making them the most British they could possibly be, and Pirates is a very distinctly British musical. Besides, that parody had been around for years by the time Vonnegut was writing Slaughterhouse-Five, so it's probable that the actual origin of the tune was not as connected to the parody anymore. But I still find the reference to be incredibly connected to the actual content of Slaughterhouse-Five.  

Even though it's not actually a song from Pirates from Penzance.