Talk Like a Pirate Day: Why the Joke Survived

Two men named John Baur and Mark Summers came up with Talk Like a Pirate Day in 1995. It was a joke between friends, given a date of 19 September for a reason that had nothing to do with pirates.

It stayed private for years. Then in 2002 they wrote to the humor columnist Dave Barry, who put it in his column, and a private joke between two people became something observed internationally.

Two friends and a newspaper column make a strange origin for an international observance and it’s worth taking seriously, because most invented holidays don’t survive and this one did.

Why This One Lasted

There are thousands of unofficial days on the calendar and almost none of them mean anything. Somebody declares a day, it gets a hashtag, and nobody thinks about it again.

The ones that stick share a property: they tell you what to do, instead of what to acknowledge. Talk Like a Pirate Day is an instruction. The whole observance is contained in the name. There’s nothing to learn, nothing to buy, no history you need to be respectful about, and the barrier to participating is roughly zero. You do the accent badly at work and that’s the entire ritual. Compare that to a day designated for awareness of something. Awareness is a state, not an action, and a day built on a state gives people nothing to hold. So it evaporates.

Watch: May the Fourth, April 20th, Talk Like a Pirate Day, and other "holidays", The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered

The Long Drive to a Pirate Faire

One year the day landed near a pirate faire up in northern California, so I drove the whole way to it.

I met a couple of friends there and we spent the day walking the faire in costume. They were dressed to the teeth. Outrageous, properly done, every piece considered. I was in a sort of aspiring pirate outfit that got me through the gate and wouldn’t have survived close inspection.

The same pattern runs through my life. I turn up dressed enough to participate, alongside people who have taken it considerably further, and I’ve stopped being embarrassed about the gap. Being the least convincing person present is a perfectly good way to spend a day. We had an excellent time and I took a great many pictures.

Being the Photographer, Not a Photographer

The part that mattered is different from simply having access.

Everybody at that faire knew me because I had been photographing these events for years and people had seen the results. I wasn’t a man with a camera. I was the photographer, which is a role, and roles come with permission attached.

So they goofed around for me. They pulled faces, struck ridiculous poses, dragged me over to photograph their friends. Nobody stiffened when I raised the camera. That’s the thing that ruins most event photography and which no amount of technique fixes. Access is being allowed in. This wasn’t that. This was something else, built up over years of turning up, taking pictures and giving them back. Being present once gets you a door. Being present repeatedly gets you a place.

Almost everything worth photographing at those events is only available to somebody who has been coming long enough to blend in.

What the Faires Taught Me About Character

The people who do this well aren’t doing an impression. They’ve built something. A coat that took months, a set of properties, a way of standing, a character with a history they can answer questions about.

What strikes me every time is how quickly the good ones stop performing at you and start talking to you. The costume is the invitation. What happens after is a conversation with somebody who has decided to be interesting on purpose. The ones who are only doing the voice run out of material in about ninety seconds. That’s a description of how thin an accent is as a foundation.

The Difference Between a Voice and a Character

This is a writing distinction and I run into it constantly in fiction manuscripts.

A writer gives a character a distinctive way of speaking and believes the character is now established. Dialect, verbal tic, catchphrase. It reads fine for a page and then the reader notices there’s nobody underneath it.

A voice is a surface feature. A character is a set of wants, fears and history that produces the voice as a side effect. You can build the second and get the first for free. You can’t go the other direction. The pirate faire version of this is visible in an afternoon. Somebody in an excellent coat with nothing behind it’s exhausting after two minutes, and somebody in an ordinary coat who has thought about who they’re will hold you for twenty.

What a Joke Needs to Survive Thirty Years

Three things, and they apply well outside this. An action instead of a sentiment, because people can do actions and can’t do sentiments on command. A low entry cost, because anything requiring preparation excludes almost everybody. Nobody prepares for 19 September. It’s exactly why it works.

And permission to be bad at it. The observance actively rewards a terrible accent. There’s no correct way to do it, so there’s no way to fail, and that removes the thing that stops most people participating in anything. Most failed traditions break on the third one. They ask people to do something in front of others where being bad at it is embarrassing.

The Faires Are the Serious Version

One day a year of bad accents is the entry level. The faires are what it looks like when people take it further. Those events run on volunteer labor and obsessive craft. Somebody made the rigging. Somebody researched the period. Somebody has been doing the same character for fifteen years and has a whole biography for a person who never existed. It’s the same impulse as the goth gathering I wrote about elsewhere on this site, and the same as a hundred other communities. People find something to take seriously that the wider world thinks is silly, and they’re visibly better off for it.

I’ve photographed a lot of that over the years and I’ve never once come away thinking the participants were the foolish ones.

How do you spend Talk Like a Pirate Day?

Badly, ideally. The observance was designed for it.

If you want the more ambitious version, find a pirate faire. Most regions have one, they’re usually cheap, and an afternoon there’s a better education in character work than most writing courses. And if you write fiction, use the day as a test. Take a character you’ve given a distinctive voice, strip the voice out entirely, and see whether anybody is left. If not, you have a costume and not a person, and 19 September is a good day to find that out.

Talk Like a Pirate Day FAQ