Static HTML is several orders of magnitude faster, in general. Some folks did some fairly simple benchmarks of a bunch of dynamic content generation systems. Now, I'd include all of the standard disclaimers about benchmarks and their validity, but it's clear that there's an order of magnitude difference between the mod_cgi results (9.2 hits / second with CGI.pm) and the static HTML (1148.1 hits / second!).

All in all, static pages are your friends if you can get away with them. Be wary, however, of the increased maintenance and tweaking cost as tilly points out.

 
perl -e 'print "I love $^X$\"$]!$/"#$&V"+@( NO CARRIER'