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A parody is a creative work designed to imitate, comment on, and/or mock its subject by means of satire or irony imitation. Often its subject is an Originality or some aspect of it (theme/content, author, style, etc), but a parody can also be about a real-life person (e.g. a politician), event, or movement (e.g. the French Revolution or 1960s counterculture). Literary scholar Professor Simon Dentith defines parody as "any cultural practice which provides a relatively allusive imitation of another cultural production or practice".Dentith (2000) p.9 The literary theorist Linda Hutcheon said "parody ... is imitation, not always at the expense of the parodied text." Parody may be found in art or culture, including literature, parody music, Theatre, television and film, animation, and Video game.
The writer and critic John Gross observes in his Oxford Book of Parodies, that parody seems to flourish on territory somewhere between pastiche ("a composition in another artist's manner, without satirical intent") and burlesque (which "fools around with the material of high literature and adapts it to low ends"). Meanwhile, the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot distinguishes between the parody and the burlesque, "A good parody is a fine amusement, capable of amusing and instructing the most sensible and polished minds; the burlesque is a miserable buffoonery which can only please the populace." Historically, when a formula grows tired, as in the case of the moralistic melodramas in the 1910s, it retains value only as a parody, as demonstrated by the Buster Keaton shorts that mocked that genre.
In Greek Old Comedy even the gods could be made fun of. The Frogs portrays the hero-turned-god Heracles as a glutton and the God of Drama Dionysus as cowardly and unintelligent. The traditional trip to the Hades story is parodied as Dionysus dresses as Heracles to go to the Underworld, in an attempt to bring back a poet to save Athens. The Ancient Greece created which parodied , often with performers dressed like satyrs.
Parody was used in early Greek philosophical texts to make philosophical points. Such texts are known as spoudaiogeloion, a famous example of which is the Silloi by Pyrrhonism philosopher Timon of Phlius which parodied philosophers living and dead. The style was a rhetorical mainstay of the Cynics and was the most common tone of the works made by Menippus and Meleager of Gadara.
In the 2nd century CE, Lucian of Samosata created a parody of travel texts such as Indica and The Odyssey. He described the authors of such accounts as liars who had never traveled, nor ever talked to any credible person who had. In his ironically named book True History Lucian delivers a story which exaggerates the hyperbole and improbable claims of those stories. Sometimes described as the first science fiction, the characters travel to the Moon, engage in interplanetary war with the help of aliens they meet there, and then return to Earth to experience civilization inside a 200-mile-long creature generally interpreted as being a whale. This is a parody of Ctesias' claims that India has a one-legged race of humans with a single foot so huge it can be used as an umbrella, Homer's stories of one-eyed giants, and so on.
The musicological definition of the term parody has now generally been supplanted by a more general meaning of the word. In its more contemporary usage, parody music usually has humorous, even satirical intent, in which familiar musical ideas or lyrics are lifted into a different, often incongruous, context.Burkholder, J. Peter. "Borrowing", Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, accessed 19 February. 2012 Musical parodies may imitate or refer to the peculiar style of a composer or artist, or even a general style of music. For example, "The Ritz Roll and Rock", a song and dance number performed by Fred Astaire in the movie Silk Stockings, parodies the rock and roll genre. Conversely, while the best-known work of "Weird Al" Yankovic is based on particular popular songs, it also often utilises wildly incongruous elements of popular culture for comedic effect.
Historian Christopher Rea writes that "In the 1910s and 1920s, writers in China's entertainment market parodied anything and everything.... They parodied speeches, advertisements, confessions, petitions, orders, handbills, notices, policies, regulations, resolutions, discourses, explications, sutras, memorials to the throne, and conference minutes. We have an exchange of letters between the Queue and the Beard and Eyebrows. We have a eulogy for a chamber pot. We have 'Research on Why Men Have Beards and Women Don't,' 'A Telegram from the Thunder God to His Mother Resigning His Post,' and 'A Public Notice from the King of Whoring Prohibiting Playboys from Skipping Debts.'"Christopher Rea, The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015), pp. 52, 53.
Jorge Luis Borges's (1939) short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", is often regarded as predicting postmodernism and conceiving the ideal of the ultimate parody.Stavans (1997) p.31Elizabeth Bellalouna, Michael L. LaBlanc, Ira Mark Milne (2000) Literature of Developing Nations for Students: L-Z p.50 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.Elices (2004) p.90 quotation: Traditional definitions of parody usually only discuss parody in the stricter sense of something intended to ridicule the text it parodies. There is also a broader, extended sense of parody that may not include ridicule, and may be based on many other uses and intentions.Hutcheon (1985) p.50 The broader sense of parody, parody done with intent other than ridicule, has become prevalent in the modern parody of the 20th century. In the extended sense, the modern parody does not target the parodied text, but instead uses it as a weapon to target something else.Hutcheon (1985) p.52Yunck 1963 The reason for the prevalence of the extended, recontextualizing type of parody in the 20th century is that artists have sought to connect with the past while registering differences brought by modernity.Hutcheon (1985) Major modernist examples of this recontextualizing parody include James Joyce's Ulysses, which incorporates elements of Homer's Odyssey in a 20th-century Irish context, and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which incorporates and recontextualizes elements of a vast range of prior texts, including Dante's Divine Comedy. The work of Andy Warhol is another prominent example of the modern "recontextualizing" parody. According to French literary theorist Gérard Genette, the most rigorous and elegant form of parody is also the most economical, that is a minimal parody, the one that literally reprises a known text and gives it a new meaning.Gérard Genette (1982) Palimpsests: literature in the second degree p.16Sangsue (2006) p.72 quotation:
Blank parody, in which an artist takes the skeletal form of an 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. Similarly, Mishu Hilmy's Trapped in the Netflix uses parody to Deconstruction contemporary Netflix shows like Mad Men providing commentary through popular characters. Don Draper mansplaining about mansplaining, Luke Danes monologizing about a lack of independence while embracing codependency. In Flann O'Brien's novel At Swim-Two-Birds, for example, mad King Sweeney, Finn MacCool, a pookah, and an assortment of 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 trope of using historical characters in fiction out of context to provide a metaphoric element.
In more recent times, the television sitcom 'Allo 'Allo! is perhaps better known than the drama Secret Army which it parodies.
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. Yankovic 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. Several artists, such as rapper Chamillionaire and Seattle-based grunge band Nirvana stated that Yankovic's parodies of their respective songs were excellent, and many artists have considered being parodied by him to be a badge of honor.
In the US legal system 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 Court citation (9th Cir. 1986)
An early parody film was the 1922 movie Mud and Sand, a Stan Laurel film that made fun of Rudolph Valentino's film Blood and Sand. Laurel specialized in parodies in the mid-1920s, writing and acting in a number of them. Some were send-ups of popular films, such as —parodied in the comic Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde (1926). Others were spoofs of Broadway plays, such as No, No, Nanette (1925), parodied as Yes, Yes, Nanette (1925). In 1940 Charlie Chaplin created a satirical comedy about Adolf Hitler with the film The Great Dictator, following the first-ever Hollywood parody of the Nazis, the Three Stooges' short subject You Nazty Spy!.
About 20 years later Mel Brooks started his career with a Hitler parody as well. After his 1967 film The Producers won both an Academy Award and a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay, Brooks became one of the most famous film parodists and created spoofs in multiple film genres. Blazing Saddles (1974) is a parody of western films, History of the World, Part I (1981) is a historical parody, Robin Hood Men in Tights (1993) is Brooks' take on the classic Robin Hood tale, and his spoofs in the horror, sci-fi and adventure genres include Young Frankenstein (1974), and Spaceballs (1987, a Star Wars spoof).
The British comedy group Monty Python is also famous for its parodies, for example, the King Arthur spoof Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974), and the religious satire Life of Brian (1979). In the 1980s the team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker parodied well-established genres such as disaster, war and police movies with the Airplane!, Hot Shots! and Naked Gun series respectively. There is a 1989 film parody from Spain of the TV series The A-Team called directed by José Truchado.
More recently, parodies have taken on whole film genres at once. One of the first was Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood and the Scary Movie franchise. Other recent genre parodies include. Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday The 13th, Not Another Teen Movie, Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, Superhero Movie, Disaster Movie, Vampires Suck, and The 41-Year-Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It, all of which have been critically panned.
A further, more constructive form of poetic parody is one that links the contemporary poet with past forms and past masters through affectionate parodying – thus sharing poetic codes while avoiding some of the anxiety of influence.S. Cushman ed., The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton 2012) p. 1003
More aggressive in tone are playground poetry parodies, often attacking authority, values and culture itself in a carnivalesque rebellion:J. Thomas, Poetry's Playground (2007) p. 45–52 "Twinkle, Twinkle little star,/ Who the hell do you think you are?"Quoted in S. Burt ed., The Cambridge History of American Poetry (Cambridge 2014)
In Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., the Supreme Court ruled that a rap parody of "Oh, Pretty Woman" by 2 Live Crew was fair use, as the parody was a distinctive, transformative work designed to ridicule the original song, and that "even if 2 Live Crew's copying of the original's first line of lyrics and characteristic opening bass riff may be said to go to the original's 'heart,' that heart is what most readily conjures up the song for parody, and it is the heart at which parody takes aim."
In 2001, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, 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.
In 2007, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied a fair use defense in the Dr. Seuss Enterprises v. Penguin Books case. Citing the Campbell v. Acuff-Rose decision, they found that a satire of the O.J. Simpson murder trial and parody of The Cat in the Hat had infringed upon the children's book because it did not provide a commentary function upon that work.
As of the implementation of the Copyright Modernization Act 2012, "Fair dealing for the purpose of research, private study, education, parody or satire does not infringe copyright."
However, following the Hargreaves Review in May 2011 (which made similar proposals to the Gowers Review) the Government broadly accepted these proposals. The current law (effective from 1 October 2014), namely Section 30A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, now provides an exception to infringement where there is fair dealing of the original work for the purpose of parody (or alternatively for the purpose of caricature or pastiche). The legislation does not define what is meant by "parody", but the UK IPO – the Intellectual Property Office (United Kingdom) – suggests that a "parody" is something that imitates a work for humorous or satirical effect. See also Fair dealing in United Kingdom law.
On the other hand, the writer and frequent parodist Vladimir Nabokov made a distinction: "Satire is a lesson, parody is a game."
Some events, such as a national tragedy, can be difficult to handle. Chet Clem, Editorial Manager of the news parody publication The Onion, told Wikinews in an interview the questions that are raised when addressing difficult topics:
Parody is by no means necessarily satirical, and may sometimes be done with respect and appreciation of the subject involved, without 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.Pratt (1991)
Shakespeare often uses a series of parodies to convey his meaning. In the social context of his era, an example can be seen in King Lear where the Jester is introduced with his coxcomb to be a parody of the king.
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