parody

 

mocking imitation in verse or prose of a literary work. The following poem by Robert Southey was parodied by Lewis Carroll:

“You are old, Father William,” the young man cried;
 [U+00A0][U+00A0]“The few locks which are left you are gray;
You are hale, Father William—a hearty old man;
 [U+00A0][U+00A0]Now tell me the reason, I pray.”

“In the days of my youth,” Father William replied;
 [U+00A0][U+00A0]“I remembered that youth would fly fast,
And abused not my health and my vigor at first,
 [U+00A0][U+00A0]That I never might need them at last.”

— Southey, “The Old Man's Comforts and How He Gained Them”

“You are old, Father William,” the young man said,
 [U+00A0][U+00A0]“And your hair has turned very white,
And yet you incessantly stand on your head—
 [U+00A0][U+00A0]Do you think at your age it is right?”

“In my youth,” Father William replied to his son,
 [U+00A0][U+00A0]“I feared it might injure the brain;
But now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
 [U+00A0][U+00A0]Why I do it again and again.”

— Carroll, “Father William”

Parodies have existed since literature began. Aristophanes brilliantly parodied the plays of Euripides; Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605–15) parodies chivalric romances; Henry Fielding's novel Joseph Andrews (1742) parodies Samuel Richardson's moral novel Pamela (1740); and Max Beerbohm's A Christmas Garland (1912) wickedly parodies such authors as Kipling, Conrad, and Henry James. Noted 20th-century parodists include Ogden Nash, S. J. Perelman, Robert Benchley, James Thurber, E. B. White, and Woody Allen.

In contemporary usage, a parody (or lampoon) is a work that imitates another work in order to ridicule, ironically comment on, or poke some affectionate fun at the work itself, the subject of the work, the author or fictional voice of the parody, or another subject. As literary theorist Linda Hutcheon (2000: 7) puts it, "parody...is imitation with a critical difference, not always at the expense of the parodied text." Another critic, Simon Dentith (2000: 9), defines parody as "any cultural practice which provides a relatively polemical allusive imitation of another cultural production or practice."

Parody exists in all art media, including literature, music, and cinema. Cultural movements can also be parodied. Light, playful parodies are sometimes colloquially referred to as spoofs. The act of such a parody is often called lampooning.

Origins

In ancient Greek literature, a parodia was a narrative poem imitating the style and prosody of epics "but treat[ing] light, satirical or mock-heroic subjects" (Denith, 10). Indeed, the apparent Greek roots of the word are par- (which can mean beside, counter, or against) and -ody (song, as in an ode). Thus, the original Greek word has sometimes been taken to mean counter-song, an imitation that is set against the original. The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, defines parody as imitation "turned as to produce a ridiculous effect" (quoted in Hutcheon, 32). Because par- also has the non-antagonistic meaning of beside, "there is nothing in parodia to necessitate the inclusion of a concept of ridicule" (Hutcheon, 32).

Roman writers explained parody as an imitation of one poet by another for humorous effect. In French Neoclassical literature, parody was also a type of poem where one work imitates the style of another for humorous effect. I LOVE YA!

Use in classical music

In reference to 15th- to 18th-century music, parody means a reworking of one kind of composition into another (e.g., a motet into a keyboard work as Girolamo Cavazzoni, Antonio de Cabezón, and Alonso Mudarra all did to Josquin motets.) More commonly, a parody mass (missa parodia) used extensive quotation from other vocal works such as motets; Victoria, Palestrina, Lassus, and other notable composers of the 16th century used this technique, also called marichu chollu. Song parodies can be filled with mishearings known as mondegreens. See also the main article on musical parody.

English term

The first usage of the word parody in English cited in the Oxford English Dictionary is in Ben Jonson, in Every Man in His Humour in 1598: "A Parodie, a parodie! to make it absurder than it was." The next notable citation comes from John Dryden in 1693, who also appended an explanation, suggesting that the word was not in common use. In his "Preface to the Satires", he says: "We may find, that they were Satryrique Poems, full of Parodies; that is, of Verses patch'd up from great Poets, and turn'd into another Sence [sic] than their Author intended them."

Dryden's definition is therefore a departure from previous usage (as he implies satire), and Dryden adapts what was still a foreign term (parody) to apply to a recent literary subgenre that had no name: the mock-heroic.

In "MacFlecknoe", Dryden created an entire poem designed to ridicule by parody. Dryden imitates Virgil's Aeneid, but the poem is about Thomas Shadwell, a minor dramatist. The implicit contrast between the heroic style from Virgil and the poor quality of the hero, Shadwell, makes Shadwell seem even worse. When dressed in Aeneas's clothes, Shadwell looks all the more ridiculous.

Other parodies of the Restoration and early 18th century were similar to Dryden's: they employed an imitation of something serious and revered to ridicule a low or foolish person or habit. This is generally referred to as the mock-heroic, a genre generally credited to Samuel Butler and his poem Hudibras. When conscious, the contrast of very serious or exalted style with very frivolous or worthless subject is parody. When the combination is unconscious, it is bathos (derived from Alexander Pope's parody of Longinus, "Peri Bathos").

Jonathan Swift is the first English author to apply the word parody to narrative prose, and it is perhaps because of a misunderstanding of Swift's own definition of parody that the term has since come to refer to any stylistic imitation that is intended to belittle. In "The Apology for the &c.", which is one of the prefaces to his A Tale of a Tub, Swift says that a parody is the imitation of an author one wishes to expose. In essence, this makes parody very little different from mockery and burlesque, and, given Swift's attention to language, it is likely that he knew this. In fact, Swift's definition of parody might well be a parody of Dryden's presumed habit of explaining the obvious or using loan words.

After Jonathan Swift, the term parody was used almost exclusively to refer to mockery, particularly in narrative.

The word spoof finds its origin in a game invented by English comedian Arthur Roberts, which involved trickery and nonsense.

Modernist and post-modernist parody

In the broader sense of Greek parodia, parody can occur when whole elements of one work are lifted out of their context and reused, not necessarily to be ridiculed. Hutcheon argues that this sense of parody has again become prevalent in the Twentieth Century, as artists have sought to connect with the past while registering differences brought by modernity. Major modernist examples of this recontextualizing parody include James Joyce's Ulysses, which incorporates elements of Homer's Odyssey in a Twentieth-Century Irish context, and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which incorporates and recontextualizes elements of a vast range of prior texts.

In the postmodern sensibility, blank parody, in which an artist takes the skeletal form of another art work and places it in a new context without ridiculing it, is common. Pastiche is a closely related genre, and parody can also occur when characters or settings belonging to one work are used in a humorous or ironic way in another, such as the transformation of minor characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Shakespeare's drama Hamlet into the principal characters in a comedic perspective on the same events in the play (and film) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. In Flann O'Brien's novel At Swim-Two-Birds, for example, mad King Sweeney, Finn MacCool, a pookah, and an assortment of cowboys all assemble in an inn in Dublin: the mixture of mythic characters, characters from genre fiction, and a quotidian setting combine for a humor that is not directed at any of the characters or their authors. This combination of established and identifiable characters in a new setting is not the same as the post-modernist habit of using historical characters in fiction out of context to provide a metaphoric element.

Reputation

Sometimes the reputation of a parody outlasts the reputation of what is being parodied. For example, Don Quixote, which mocks the traditional knight errant tales, is much more well-known than the novel that inspired it, Amadis de Gaula (although Amadis is mentioned in the book). Another notable case is the novel Shamela by Henry Fielding (1742), which was a parody of the gloomy epistolary novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740) by Samuel Richardson. Many of Lewis Carroll's parodies, such as "You Are Old, Father William", are much better known than the originals.

Also, some artists carve out careers by making parodies. One of the best known examples is that of "Weird Al" Yankovic. His career of parodying other musical acts and their songs has outlasted many of the artists or bands he has parodied. It is worth mentioning that while he is not required under law to get permission to parody, as a personal rule, however, he does seek permission to parody a person's song before recording it. This is to help maintain good relations with others in the music industry, and has become something of a badge of honor for other artists, since many artists parodied by Yankovic felt that he would not choose to create a parody of a song or genre that was not successful.

The point that in most cases a parody of a work constitutes fair use was upheld in the case of Rick Dees, who decided to use 29 seconds of the music from the song When Sonny Gets Blue to parody Johnny Mathis singing style even after being refused permission. An appeals court upheld the trial court's decision that this type of parody represents fair use. Fisher v. Dees 794 F.2d 432 (9th Cir. 1986)

Film parodies

Some genre theorists, following Bakhtin, see parody as a natural development in the life cycle of any genre; this idea has proven especially fruitful for genre film theorists. Such theorists note that Western movies, for example, after the classic stage defined the conventions of the genre, underwent a parody stage, in which those same conventions were ridiculed and critiqued. Because audiences had seen these classic Westerns, they had expectations for any new Westerns, and when these expectations were inverted, the audience laughed. A subset of parody is self-parody in which artists satirize themselves (as in Ricky Gervais's Extras) or their work (such as Antonio Banderas's Puss in Boots in Shrek 2), or an artist or genre repeats elements of earlier works to the point that originality is lost.

Commercial parodies

Now that anybody can grab a handycam and make a movie, spoofs emerged as a new form of entertainment. Advertising companies organize contests that can easily provide powerful insights of what's cool in the business at the moment. You Spoof Discovery showed viewer-submitted parodies of Discovery Channel shows. The official name of the show is "You Spoof Discovery: The ultimate viewer-submitted low-cost high-quality extremely entertaining Discovery parody special hosted by Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs, who also narrates the series American Chopper, American Hot Rod and Deadliest Catch".

Copyright issues

Although a parody can be considered a derivative work under United States Copyright Law, it can be protected under the fair use doctrine, which is codified in 17 USC § 107. The Supreme Court of the United States stated that parody "is the use of some elements of a prior author's composition to create a new one that, at least in part, comments on that author's works." That commentary function provides some justification for use of the older work. See Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc.

In 2001, the United States Court of Appeals, 11th Circuit, in Suntrust v. Houghton Mifflin, upheld the right of Alice Randall to publish a parody of Gone with the Wind called The Wind Done Gone, which told the same story from the point of view of Scarlett O'Hara's slaves, who were glad to be rid of her.

Social and political uses

Parody is closely related to satire and is often used in conjunction with it to make social and political points. Examples include Swift's A Modest Proposal, which satirizes English neglect of Ireland by parodying emotionally disengaged political tracts, and, in contemporary culture, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, which parody a news broadcast and a talk show, respectively, to satirize political and social trends and events.

However, satire is usually used when someone is earnestly trying to push for change. Parodies are sometimes done with respect and appreciation of the subject involved, while not being a heedless sarcastic attack.

Parody has also been used to facilitate dialogue between cultures or subcultures. Sociolinguist Mary Louise Pratt identifies parody as one of the "arts of the contact zone," through which marginalized or oppressed groups "selectively appropriate," or imitate and take over, aspects of more empowered cultures. [1] Similarly, Henry Louis Gates and Gene Caponi regard parody as an important technique of signifyin', the African-American rhetoric of indirect criticism and semantic innovation.

Educational aspects

Parody is an important element of student writing, David Bartholomae argues, because students imitate and alter academic forms in an attempt to master those forms.

Also, parody arguably sometimes makes canonical works accessible to larger audiences by presenting them humorously; see, for example, parodies of Poe's "The Raven" and "The Tell-Tale Heart" on The Simpsons.

See also

• Intertextuality
• Literary technique
• Parody advertisement
• Parody music
• Parody religion
• Parody science
• Satire
• Subvertising

Examples

Historical examples

• Sir Thopas in Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer
• Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes
• Beware the Cat by William Baldwin
• The Knight of the Burning Pestle by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
• Dragon of Wantley, an anonymous 17th century ballad
• Hudibras by Samuel Butler
• "MacFlecknoe", by John Dryden
• A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift
• The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope
• Namby Pamby by Henry Carey
• Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
• The Dunciad by Alexander Pope
• The Memoirs of Martinus Scribblerus by John Gay, Alexander Pope, John Arbuthnot, Earl of Oxford, et al.
• The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia [sic] by Samuel Johnson
• Mozart's A Musical Joke (Ein musikalischer Spaß), K.522 (1787) - parody of incompetent contemporaries of Mozart, as assumed by some theorists
• Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlysle
• Ways and Means, or The aged, aged man, by Lewis Carroll. Much of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass is parodic of Victorian schooling.
• Batrachomuomachia (battle between frogs and mice) , an Iliad parody by an unknown ancient Greek author
• A Sonnet by J K Stephen, an example of parody as serious literary criticism in that it draws attention to both the weaknesses and the strengths of the body of work it lampoons.
• Britannia Sitting On An Egg a machine-printed illustrated envelope published by the stationer W.R. Hume of Leith, Scotland, parodying the machine-printed illustrated envelope (commissioned by Rowland Hill (postal reformer) and designed by the artist William Mulready) used to launch the British postal service reforms of 1840.

Contemporary examples

• "Weird Al" Yankovic's, Tom Lehrer's, Cledus T. Judd's, Bob Rivers', Allan Sherman's and Steve Goodie's innumerable song parodies
• Mel Brook's films such as Spaceballs, Robin Hood: Men In Tights, and Blazing Saddles
• Airplane! - parody of airplane disaster movies (namely Zero Hour!).
• Austin Powers series - parodies of spy films, especially the James Bond series, and a broad range of popular culture.
• The Boomer Bible - a book by R. F. Laird, which parodies contemporary society and mores.
• The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) – a parody of all of the plays of William Shakespeare.
• CNNNN - an Australian parody of 24 hours cable news networks, such as CNN and Fox News.
• The Colbert Report - a parody of pundit programs, particularly The O'Reilly Factor.
• The Daily Show - satirical news show on Comedy Central hosted by Jon Stewart.
• Don't Be A Menace To South Central While Drinking Your Juice In The Hood - A parody of coming-of-age 'hood movies' such as Juice, South Central, Higher Learning, Do The Right Thing, Menace II Society, Poetic Justice, New Jack City, Dead Presidents, and most prominently Boyz N the Hood.
• Drawn Together - parodies the various genres of animation, along with TV reality shows.
• Hot Shots! - A parody about the war film Top Gun (film) and other movies.
• The Kentucky Fried Movie - A parody of kung-fu movies, courtroom TV shows, women-in-prison movies, pornography, etc.
• Kung Fu Hustle - a movie by Steven Chow parodying Chinese wuxia films, as well as gangster films in general
• Landover Baptist Church - Parody of Southern Baptist hyper-religiosity.
• MAD Magazine - magazine that features parodies of movies, music, video games, and television shows.
• Chris Morris's The Day Today and Brass Eye - parodies of high paced self-important genre of TV news programmes
• The Naked Gun series - A parody of police movies and TV shows (based upon the Police Squad! TV series).
• Not Another Teen Movie, a movie that parodies teen flicks such as She's All That, American Pie, The Breakfast Club, Bring It On and various others.
• The Onion - parody of newspaper and magazine journalism
• Parodius - parody of the side-scrolling video game Gradius as well as other Konami franchises
• Perfect Hair Forever- an anime parody on adult swim.
• El Privilegio de Mandar - is a Mexican politic parody. It's also the most popular parody in the country.
• Radio Active - BBC parody of poorly funded rural local commercial radio
• Real Stories - a parody of Australian current affairs television.
• Restart - theatrical parody of British politics by the UK's Komedy Kollective.
• The Rutles - parody of The Beatles
• Scary Movie (Quadrilogy) - Parodies of horror movies such as Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Exorcist, The Haunting, Signs, The Ring, The Grudge, Saw etc. Followed by Epic Movie and Date Movie
• Scream a parody of the slasher horror genre
• Second City Television - parody of North American network television programming.
• Attack of the Killer Tomatoes - A cult favorite parody of monster movies and musicals that spawned three sequels, a video game, and a TV series
• Soap - soap-opera parody
• The Twelfth Man - Australian parody of Nine Network Cricket TV coverage.
• The Sunday Format - BBC radio parody of vacuous lifestyle journalism
• This Is Spinal Tap, a spoof of the heavy metal music business, by Rob Reiner
• National Lampoon -series of movies.

Visual example

Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci. Original painting from circa 1503 – 1507. Oil on poplar.

Duchamp's parody of the Mona Lisa adds a goatee and moustache.

Marcel Duchamp's Dadaist painting LHOOQ parodies DaVinci's Mona Lisa by marring it with a goatee and moustache. In keeping with his Dadaist practices, which called artistic conventions and aesthetic assumptions into question, Duchamp paired his visual parody with a low pun; in French, when the letters "L.H.O.O.Q." are pronounced one after the other, the phrase sounds like "elle a chaud au cul", or "her ass is hot".

References

• Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1981. ISBN 0-292-71527-7.
• Caponi, Gena Dagel (1999). Signifyin(g), Sanctifyin', & Slam Dunking: A Reader in African American Expressive Culture. University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 1-55849-183-X.
• Dentith, Simon. Parody (The New Critical Idiom). Routledge. ISBN 0-415-18221-2.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1988) The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-503463-5.
• Gray, Jonathan. (2006) Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-4153-6202-4.
• Harries, Dan. (2000) Film Parody. London: BFI. ISBN 0-851-70802-1.
• Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms' (1985). New York: Methuen. ISBN 0-252-06938-2.
• Pratt, Mary Louise. "Arts of the Contact Zone"
• Rose, Margaret. (1993) Parody: Ancient, Modern and Post-Modern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-41860-7.
• Tnuva Spoof

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