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This was how I learned about the pirate store on Valencia, which sells peg legs, eye patches, and lard. (It would be some time before I discovered this was a front for Dave Eggers' community writing program.) In the same year, Geoff Ellsworth of the Towne Dandies staged an ingenious one-man pirate musical called That's What Pirates Gotta Do, which played the Odeon more than a half-dozen times. A short time later, Bryan Rhodes wrote and staged The True History of Anne Bonney and Mary Reade, which required 10 actors and an original score of four sea songs. Suddenly, I was seeing evidence of freebooters on every street corner, and every fashion hound in town was proudly displaying a Jolly Roger.
"Shhhh! Pirates are the new monkeys!" wrote Rhodes in an e-mail, referring to the simian trend upon which designer Paul Frank has so ruthlessly capitalized. I was drawn up short.
It's true. Pirates are slowly, but surely, replacing monkeys in the pop culture rumpus room. And this is not the first time I've heard it mentioned.
"I told Rhodes pirates are the new monkeys," clarifies Walter Askew, singer for Salty Walt and the Rattlin' Ratlines, a group that performs sea chanteys at the Edinburgh Castle on the last Sunday of every month. "I read it in a comic book, but the question is not, "Why pirates?' but, "Why monkeys?'"
As a sometime maritime museum guide with an English Lit degree that focused on folklore, Askew has plenty of theories as to the legitimate reasons the pirate aesthetic might resonate with present-day San Franciscans.
"We all have that image from the 1950s of everyone playing cowboys and Indians, but during the Depression, kids were absolutely mad for Treasure Island," explains Askew. "In a depressed economy, when our society is growing simultaneously more prone to, and more afraid of, violence, pirates offer a release valve, an inoculation if you will. It's a way to engage in fantasies of exploitation, exploration, and violence at a safe distance."
David Ponkey, a professional storyteller who works as a counselor for severely abused children, agrees. "How many cool things die is the rubric by which most kids judge a story," says Ponkey. "But pirate stories also play with gray areas that appeal to adults. A pirate is at once a hero and a villain, a rugged individualist who strikes out on his own and a thieving cutthroat. To the English, Sir Francis Drake was a national hero, but to the Spanish, he was the most notorious pirate ever encountered. In a time when a lot of those ambiguities exist, pirates are sure to become very attractive."
"Pirates are the thinking man's monkey," states Ryan Yount, author of the essay "Pirates Are the New Monkeys," which is included in the first issue of Scurvy Dogs, a comic book which he and video game producer Andrew Boyd wrote early this year, just in time, they say, to exploit the brewing pirate zeitgeist.
"I mean, sure, monkeys will always be funny," says Yount, stretching out on a stylish couch in Isotope: The Comic Book Lounge, where he works part time, "by virtue of the fact they are, well, monkeys. But pirates. Pirates have a whole world to draw from.
"Think about it: A monkey puts on clothes, and it's funny. A monkey gives you the finger, pulls out a gun, eats his own shit, it's funny. Pirates can do all that, and more. Pirates are very easy to adapt to humor."
The evidence is Scurvy Dogs, an account of the side-splitting misadventures of Blackbeard and his crew while they are marooned in present-day San Francisco.
While it may not be easy to maintain pirate cred in the face of modern maritime law, the digital economy, and Internet dating, in the cartoon, the Scurvy Dogs gang gives it a good shot, depending on historically accurate facts that, in a modern setting, appear far more ridiculous than fiction. For example, Blackbeard had a habit of lighting gunners' matches in his beard to intimidate his foe -- which, in this case, might be his corporate boss.
"It's all about juxtaposition," says Yount, "but, really, pirate jokes just write themselves. STDs might not be funny anymore because, well, we all have them, but scurvy, that's always funny."
"Yargh! Give me a citrus wedge with that drink. Me gums are bleeding," says Boyd, taking a sip of his cocktail. The young men chuckle, casually riffing off one another. By the end of our hour-long conversation, they've generated no fewer than four story lines to add to the seven Scurvy Dogs issues they'd already plotted. All the concepts are funny, and not just because of the pirate voice.
"Hopefully, we'll get a couple years of good pirate humor before Long John Silver's decides it's time to expand."
"The pirates of our fantasies have a devil-may-care attitude that is really appealing," says Rhodes as he counts the third pirate-flag T-shirt to pass by in the space of 30 short minutes.
"That one was a Calico Jack," he offers as an aside, before continuing: "But pirates were the founding fathers of the world's first democracies, a mix of races and nationalities fighting against governments and corporations, whom they saw as the greater pirates ... [E]ach man vowed to a strict code of business and conduct. This was in addition to any Articles of Piracy drafted as a constitution, or agreement, between a ship's captain and his crew.
