ABSTRACT
The play of genres activates a particular set of humorous effects in the Savoy operas of Gilbert and Sullivan. These comic operas are anthological and formally ironic, a pastiche of nineteenth-century theatrical, literary, and popular genres turned against themselves and mixed up together to form a capacious novelty. As is the case with the related notion of parody, pastiche can equally imply critique and homage, dismantling and reconstruction. That satirical bite, in turn, is softened or muted by the historical and aesthetic distancing of the parody and pastiche. The Savoy operas are themselves famously subject to being taken off and parodied, or to being taken up piecemeal into current postmodern pastiches. A wholesale combination of pastiche and parody, those genres characteristically mixed characters and plots from several classical, or fairy-tale sources in a gigantic and somewhat unwieldy mass of elements that pointed to the exuberance, if often also to the potential incoherence, of this over-the-top, excessive form of fun.
