“The pirate’s life is so deadly that humor is an essential part of what they do. They tell jokes, they make jests, they perform plays. They’re hilarious.” People are obsessed with pirates, Rediker says, because, while pirates may be “the common enemy of mankind,” they’re also “the freest people on earth,” which makes pirate humor particularly cutting. Because they stand?or sail?apart from the culture, pirates are well suited to make mockery of it. Pirates may have always been funny, but their contemporaries usually found them more terrible than witty. Either way, they found them fascinating. —Jill “Calico Bless Kid” Lepore —Talk of the Past: The Sea in Me Blood (Common-place)

Best insight from this piece, attributed to Dave Barry: “What if Bill Clinton, a fancy-dressed freebooter if there ever was one, had told the American people, ‘I did not have sex with that woman, me hearties’?”