Parody

• 1. Introduction

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  Parody flourishes on contested ground. The writer and critic John Gross places it somewhere between pastiche, which he calls 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. Denis Diderot's Encyclopedie drew a sharper line. A good parody, it said, is a fine amusement, capable of amusing and instructing the most sensible and polished minds. The burlesque, by contrast, is a miserable buffoonery which can only please the populace. So what exactly is this creative work, and why have scholars argued for centuries over whether it must ridicule at all? Why does the imitation sometimes outlast the thing it imitates? And how did a single Greek word, built from para and oide, end up meaning both counter-song and a song sung merely beside another?

• 2. The Counter Song

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  Aristotle, in the Poetics, credits Hegemon of Thasos as the inventor of a kind of parody. By slightly altering the wording in well-known poems, Hegemon transformed the sublime into the ridiculous. The Greek word parodia carried this tension in its bones. Its parts are para, meaning beside, counter, or against, and oide, meaning song. Because par- also has the non-antagonistic meaning of beside, scholars note there is nothing in parodia to necessitate the inclusion of a concept of ridicule. The Oxford English Dictionary leans the other way, defining parody as imitation turned so as to produce a ridiculous effect.

  Greek Old Comedy spared not even the gods. The Frogs portrays the hero-turned-god Heracles as a glutton and casts Dionysus, the God of Drama, as cowardly and unintelligent. The familiar trip to the Underworld becomes a joke when Dionysus dresses as Heracles, hoping to bring back a poet to save Athens. The Ancient Greeks also created satyr plays, which parodied tragic plays, often with performers dressed like satyrs.

  Philosophy was no shield either. Parody appeared in early Greek philosophical texts, a form known as spoudaiogeloion. A famous example is the Silloi by the Pyrrhonist philosopher Timon of Phlius, which parodied philosophers living and dead. The style was a rhetorical mainstay of the Cynics and the most common tone in works by Menippus and Meleager of Gadara.

  Lucian of Samosata, writing in the 2nd century CE, took aim at travel writers. He described the authors of accounts like Indica and The Odyssey as liars who had never traveled, nor ever talked to any credible person who had. His ironically named True History exaggerates their hyperbole until it bursts. The characters travel to the Moon, wage interplanetary war with the help of aliens, and return to Earth to live inside a 200-mile-long creature generally interpreted as a whale. Lucian was mocking Ctesias, who claimed India held a one-legged race whose single foot was huge enough to serve as an umbrella, and Homer, with his one-eyed giants. Sometimes True History is described as the first science fiction.

• 3. The Family Of Forms

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  Satire and parody both exaggerate their source material in humorous ways, yet they aim at different targets. A satire makes fun of the real world. A parody is a derivative of a specific work, called a specific parody, or of a general genre, called a general parody or spoof. Satires are provocative and critical, pointing to a specific vice in an individual or a group to mock them into correction or as a form of punishment. Parodies lean toward playful humor and do not always attack what they imitate.

  Travesty, by contrast, imitates and transforms a work but focuses more on satirizing it. Because satire attacks someone or something, the harmless playfulness of parody is lost. A skit imitates works in a satirical regime, yet unlike a travesty it does not transform the source material.

  Pastiche is the quiet cousin. It imitates a work as a parody does, but it is neither transformative of the original nor humorous. The literary critic Fredric Jameson called pastiche a blank parody, or parody that has lost its sense of humor.

  Burlesque keeps its sights on heroic poems and theater, degrading popular heroes and gods and mocking the common tropes of the genre. Simon Dentith described this type of parody as parodic anti-heroic drama. Dentith, a literary scholar, also offered a broad definition of parody itself: any cultural practice which provides a relatively polemical allusive imitation of another cultural production or practice. The theorist Linda Hutcheon pushed against the assumption of cruelty, writing that parody is imitation, not always at the expense of the parodied text.

• 4. Imitation Without Mockery

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  Since the 20th century, parody has been treated as the central artistic device, the catalysing agent of artistic creation and innovation. This happened most prominently in the second half of the century with postmodernism, though modernism and Russian formalism had already anticipated it. For the Russian formalists, parody was a way of liberation from the background text, a means of producing new and autonomous artistic forms.

  Jorge Luis Borges captured the idea in his 1939 short story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, often regarded as predicting postmodernism and conceiving the ideal of the ultimate parody. In the broader sense of the Greek parodia, parody can occur when whole elements of one work are lifted from their context and reused, not necessarily to be ridiculed. In this extended sense the modern parody does not target the parodied text. Instead it uses that text as a weapon to aim at something else. Artists turned to this recontextualizing form because they wanted to connect with the past while registering the differences brought by modernity.

  Major modernist examples carry the technique. James Joyce's Ulysses incorporates elements of Homer's Odyssey in a 20th-century Irish context. T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land recontextualizes a vast range of prior texts, including Dante's The Inferno. The work of Andy Warhol is another prominent example of the modern recontextualizing parody. The French literary theorist Gerard Genette argued that the most rigorous and elegant form of parody is also the most economical: a minimal parody, one that literally reprises a known text and gives it a new meaning.

  Characters can migrate too. The minor figures Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Shakespeare's Hamlet become the principal characters in a comedic view of the same events in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. In Flann O'Brien's novel At Swim-Two-Birds, mad King Sweeney, Finn MacCool, a pookah, and an assortment of cowboys all gather in an inn in Dublin. The mixture of mythic figures, genre-fiction characters, and an ordinary setting produces humor aimed at none of them.

• 5. The Shadow Outlasts The Thing

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  Don Quixote mocks the traditional knight errant tales, yet it is far better known than the novel that inspired it, Amadis de Gaula, though Amadis is mentioned in the book. The pattern repeats across the centuries. Henry Fielding's Shamela, published in 1742, parodied the gloomy epistolary novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, written in 1740 by Samuel Richardson. Many of Lewis Carroll's parodies of Victorian didactic verse for children, such as You Are Old, Father William, are far better known than the largely forgotten originals.

  Stella Gibbons's comic novel Cold Comfort Farm has eclipsed the pastoral novels of Mary Webb that largely inspired it. The television sitcom 'Allo 'Allo! is perhaps better known than the drama Secret Army it parodies. Some artists build entire careers this way. The career of Weird Al Yankovic, parodying other musical acts and their songs, has outlasted many of the artists or bands he targeted.

  Yankovic is not required under law to get permission to parody. As a personal rule, he seeks permission to parody a song before recording it anyway. The rapper Chamillionaire and the Seattle-based grunge band Nirvana called his parodies of their songs excellent, and many artists have considered being parodied by him a badge of honor.

• 6. Spoofing The Screen

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  The 1922 film Mud and Sand, a Stan Laurel picture, made fun of Rudolph Valentino's Blood and Sand. Laurel specialized in parodies in the mid-1920s, writing and acting in a number of them. He sent up popular films in Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde in 1926, and spoofed Broadway plays, turning No, No, Nanette of 1925 into Yes, Yes, Nanette the same year.

  Charlie Chaplin built a satirical comedy about Adolf Hitler in 1940 with The Great Dictator. It followed the first-ever Hollywood parody of the Nazis, the Three Stooges short You Nazty Spy!. About twenty years later Mel Brooks also launched his career with a Hitler parody. 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. He spoofed westerns in Blazing Saddles in 1974, history in History of the World, Part I in 1981, and the Robin Hood tale in Robin Hood Men in Tights in 1993. His genre spoofs also include Young Frankenstein in 1974 and the Star Wars send-up Spaceballs in 1987.

  The British comedy group Monty Python earned its own fame, with the King Arthur spoof Monty Python and the Holy Grail in 1974 and the religious satire Life of Brian in 1979. In the 1980s the team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker parodied disaster, war, and police movies with the Airplane!, Hot Shots!, and Naked Gun series.

  Genre theorists, following Bakhtin, see parody as a natural development in the life cycle of any genre. Western movies, after a classic stage defined the conventions, underwent a parody stage in which those same conventions were ridiculed. Because audiences had seen the classic Westerns, they carried expectations, and when those expectations were inverted, they laughed. The same logic explains an old observation about tired formulas. When the moralistic melodramas of the 1910s grew stale, they retained value only as parody, as the Buster Keaton shorts that mocked the genre demonstrated.

• 7. Borrowed Notes

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  In classical music, parody once meant something purely technical: the reworking of one kind of composition into another. Girolamo Cavazzoni, Antonio de Cabezon, and Alonso Mudarra all turned motets by Josquin des Prez into keyboard works. A parody mass, the missa parodia, or an oratorio quoted extensively from other vocal works such as motets or cantatas. Victoria, Palestrina, Lassus, and other 16th-century composers used the technique. Bach drew on the same procedure in the Baroque period, reworking music from cantatas in his Christmas Oratorio.

  That musicological meaning has generally been supplanted by a broader one. In contemporary usage, musical parody carries humorous or even satirical intent, lifting familiar musical ideas or lyrics into a different and often incongruous context. The Ritz Roll and Rock, a song and dance number Fred Astaire performed in the movie Silk Stockings, parodies the rock and roll genre. The best-known work of Weird Al Yankovic is based on particular popular songs, yet it often pulls in wildly incongruous elements of pop culture for comedic effect.

  The word entered English long before any of this. The Oxford English Dictionary cites its first English usage in Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humour in 1598: A Parodie, a parodie! to make it absurder than it was. The next citation comes from John Dryden in 1693, who appended an explanation, a sign the word was already in common use.

• 8. The Law And The Limits

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  In the United States, parody is protected under the fair use doctrine of copyright law. The defense succeeds more readily when the use of an existing copyrighted work is transformative, such as a critique or commentary upon it. 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. The Court wrote that even if the copying of the original's first line and characteristic opening bass riff went to the song's heart, that heart is what most readily conjures up the song for parody, and it is the heart at which parody takes aim.

  Not every case lands the same way. In 2001 the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, in Suntrust v. Houghton Mifflin, upheld Alice Randall's right to publish The Wind Done Gone, a parody of Gone with the Wind told from the point of view of Scarlett O'Hara's slaves, who were glad to be rid of her. But in 2007 the Ninth Circuit, in Dr. Seuss Enterprises v. Penguin Books, denied a fair use defense. A satire of the O. J. Simpson murder trial that borrowed from The Cat in the Hat had infringed, the court found, because it offered no commentary on that work. Earlier, in Fisher v. Dees, an appeals court had upheld fair use when Rick Dees used 29 seconds of music from When Sonny Gets Blue to parody Johnny Mathis's singing style, even after being refused permission.

  Canada offers protection for Fair Dealing but, before recent reform, had no explicit protection for parody and satire. In Canwest v. Horizon, the publisher of the Vancouver Sun sued a group that had published a pro-Palestinian parody of the paper. The judge, Alan Donaldson, ruled that parody is not a defence to a copyright claim. The Copyright Modernization Act of 2012 changed that, stating that fair dealing for the purpose of research, private study, education, parody or satire does not infringe copyright.

  The United Kingdom moved slowly. The 2006 Gowers Review of Intellectual Property recommended creating an exception for caricature, parody, or pastiche by 2008. After consultation the Intellectual Property Office declined, saying the case was not sufficient to override the disadvantages to creators and owners. After the Hargreaves Review in May 2011, the government accepted similar proposals. Section 30A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 took effect on the 1st of October 2014, allowing fair dealing for the purpose of parody, caricature, or pastiche. Elsewhere the tolerance vanishes entirely. In the UAE and North Korea, parodies are not allowed, and the person who makes one can be fined or even jailed.