A few days ago I was being interviewed. No details now; more later, perhaps. But one question I was asked went something like this: "Some people regard Gilbert and Sullivan as rather twee and irrelevant. What would you say to convince them otherwise?" Caught a little off guard, I said something about how G&S is still very relevant, and mentioned the still-current satire in "Utopia Limited". Afterwards, I realised I had missed the point rather. I should have said something like this....
Gilbert is one of the first "modern" humorists. His attitude is sceptical, ironic/sarcastic, and automatically anti-authority. One of the main lessons of the operas is that anyone with a high office and a flashy uniform is generally an idiot.
He also thinks human behaviour is, by and large, ridiculous and absurd. We govern our actions by selfish motives which we hide under polite forms. Sometimes we seem like clockwork automata. Life is a show, its palaces and pleasures are fantasies that fade. There is very little sense of religious faith in Gilbert. Nothing can be relied upon. Certainly the happy endings that fiction and drama drum into our heads are unreal and illusory.
If the operas seem twee and unreal, it is because he is exaggerating the conventions of drama to cartoon absurdity. The happy endings seem strained and unreal because Gilbert himself could not beleive in them, and often he seems to have made them unreal to the point of sarcasm, as in HMS Pinafore. He is a pessimistic humorist.
Maybe it's a good job that I didn't think of saying any of this in the interview....
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