I was born into a generation that still took light music seriously. Sullivan was also admired and copied by early composers such as Ivan Caryll, Lionel Monckton, Victor Herbert, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Ivor Novello, and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Miranda commented: 'I always felt like 'mineral' wasn't the best possible rhyme.' A revelation!' In the number 'Right Hand Man' from the 2015 musical Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda, George Washington refers to himself with irony as 'The model of a modern major general', which he rhymes with 'men are all' and 'pedestal'. Gilbert's satirical quality entranced us – his use of rhyme and meter, his light touch, the marvelous way his words blended with Sullivan's music. Yip Harburg said, 'Perhaps my first great literary idol was W. Johnny Mercer said, 'We all come from Gilbert.' Alan Jay Lerner wrote that Gilbert 'raised lyric writing from a serviceable craft to a legitimate popular art form,' and, despite professing not to be a Gilbert fan, Stephen Sondheim wrote 'Please Hello' for Pacific Overtures (1976), a song that has been called 'an homage' to Gilbert. Even some of the plot elements from G&S operas entered subsequent musicals for example, 1937's Me and My Girl features a portrait gallery of ancestors that, like the portraits in Ruddigore, come alive to remind their descendant of his duty. Wodehouse, Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, Yip Harburg, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein II and Sheldon Harnick. Gilbert's complex rhyme schemes and satirical lyrics served as a model for Edwardian musical comedy writers such as Adrian Ross and Owen Hall, and for such 20th century Broadway lyricists as P. According to theatre writer John Bush Jones, Gilbert and Sullivan were 'the primary progenitors of the twentieth century American musical' in which book, music and lyrics combine to form an integrated whole, and they demonstrated 'that musicals can address contemporary social and political issues without sacrificing entertainment value'.

The American and British musical owes a tremendous debt to Gilbert and Sullivan, who introduced innovations in content and form that directly influenced the development of musical theatre through the 20th century. For instance, a 29 February 1940 article in The New York Times noted that Frederic, from The Pirates of Penzance, was finally out of his indentures (having reached his 21st birthday, as described in that opera). The operas have so pervaded Western culture that events from the 'lives' of their characters from the operas are memorialized by major news outlets. Because they are well-known, and convey a distinct sense of Britishness (or even Victorian Britishness), and because they are in the public domain, songs from the operas appear 'in the background' in many movies and television shows. They have also influenced political style and discourse, literature, film and television and advertising, and have been widely parodied by humorists. The Savoy operas heavily influenced the course of the development of modern musical theatre.

Lines and quotations from the Gilbert and Sullivan operas have become part of the English language, such as ' short, sharp shock', 'What never? Well, hardly ever!', 'let the punishment fit the crime', and 'A policeman's lot is not a happy one'. For nearly 150 years, Gilbert and Sullivan have pervasively influenced popular culture in the English-speaking world.

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