Types of Parody

By Don Nilsen and Alleen Nilsen, Arizona State University

In his Poetics (ii.5), Aristotle said that Hegemon of Thasos (who flourished during the Peloponesian War) was the inventor of the type of parody in which the wording of well-known poems is changed from the sublime to the ridiculous. In ancient Greece, a “parodia” was a narrated poem which imitated the style and the prosody of an epic poem, but was spoken with a light, satiric, or even mocking tone. An example this was The Frogs in which Heracles is a glutton, and Dionysus is a stupid coward. The ancient Greeks also created “satyr” plays which parodied tragic plays. In these plays, the performers were frequently dressed as satyrs. Later, Erasmus (c. 1466-1536) worked with rhetorical devices, and developed the contrast between Schemes and Tropes. Schemes include such categories as Alliteration, Assonance, Rhyme, Scansion, Slant Rhyme, Eye Rhyme, etc. Tropes include such categories as Metaphor, Irony, Metonymy, Synecdoche, and Parody.

Wolcott Gibbs wrote in The New Yorker that parody is the hardest form of creative writing because the style of the subject must be reproduced in slightly enlarged form, while at the same time holding the interest of people who might not have read the original. Further complications are posed since it must entertain at the same time that it criticizes and must be written in a style that is not the writer’s own. He concluded that the only way to make it more difficult would be to write it in Cantonese.

Today we are surrounded by parodies, like Quentin Tarentino’s film Pulp Fiction, and Jeffrey Katzenberg’s Shrek, not to mention the “Scary” movies the “Airplane” movies, and all the rest. And then, there are fake news sources like Mad Magazine, National Lampoon, Harvard Lampoon, The Onion, Real Time with Bill Maher, The Colbert Report, and Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show.” One humorist quipped “I get my news from “The Daily Show” and my humor from “Fox News.”

Some of Lewis Carroll’s parodies were just for fun. When Lewis Carroll wrote a parody of the poem “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star. How I wonder where you are,” it became, “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Bat. How I wonder where you’re at.” This is merely fun word play. But some of Carroll’s parodies had a deeper significance. Lewis Carroll lived in a time when Victorian poetry tended to be filled with sentimentality and didacticism, so many of Carroll’s poems parodied that sentimentality and didacticism. G. W. Langford wrote a poem that not only preached to parents, but also reminded them of the high mortality rate for young children: “Speak gently to the little child! / It’s love be sure to gain; / Teach it in accents soft and mild / It may not long remain.” Carroll’s parody turned this poem into a song for the Duchess to sing to a piglet wrapped in baby clothes: “Speak roughly to your little boy. And beat him when he sneezes. / He only does it to annoy / Because he knows it teases.” The poem “Against Idleness and Mischief” by Isaac Watts read as follows: “How doth the little busy bee / Improve each shining hour / and gather honey all the day / From every opening flower!” Lewis Carroll’s parody is much more fun, and much less didactic: “How doth the little crocodile / Improve his shining tail / And pour the waters of the Nile / On every golden scale?”

While we usually think of parodies in relation to written work, art can also be parodied as happened to a 1656 painting of the Spanish court by Diego Velázquez, who was the leading artist of the Spanish Golden Age. Velázquez painted himself into the picture. In the picture he is standing to the left with his paintbrush and palette. In 1957, Pablo Picasso painted a parody piece of the Velázquez painting, with the artist, the dog, the children, the dwarf and all of the rest of it painted through the eyes of a cubist. And there was further distortion. The artist is made much larger than in the original, and the figures and the windows were very much stylized.

The dedications of nine of Daniel Handler’s Lemony Snicket books are all parodies of Dante’s dedication to Beatrice in his Divine Comedy. The Lemony Snicket variations are as follows:

To Beatrice—Darling, Dearest, Dead…

For Beatrice—You’ll always be in my heart, in my mind, and in your grave.

For Beatrice—When we were together I felt breathless. Now you are.

For Beatrice—Our love broke my heart, and stopped yours.

For Beatrice—When we met, my life began. Soon afterwards, yours ended.

For Beatrice—Summer without you is as cold as winter. Winter without you is even colder.

To Beatrice—My love flew like a butterfly, Until death swooped down like a bat. As the poet Emma Montana McEllroy said: “That’s the end of that.”

For Beatrice—When we met, you were pretty, and I was lonely. Now, I’m pretty lonely.

For Beatrice—Dead women tell no tales. Sad men write them down.

But who is this Beatrice? At age 9, Dante Aligieri met Beatrice Portinari, and fell in love. They greeted each other on the street for sixteen years. Dante was promised to another woman, Gemma. In 1290, at age 25, Beatrice died. Dante took refuge in writing to and about Beatrice.

Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One parodies the commercialization of death by showing how the California funeral industry turns burials into Hollywood extravaganzas. At Whispering Glades, caskets come in three grades: waterproof, moisture proof, and dampness proof. The park is divided into zones, each having its own work of art. The “Poet’s Corner” for example has “Xanadu Falls” and is dedicated to Homer. The book becomes darker as it focuses on Aimee Thanatogenous, whose first name is French for “beloved,” and whose last name relates to Thanatos, the Greek God of death. When the Guru Brahman sarcastically tells her to go to his office on the 14th floor, and jump out of the window. She does so. As she jumps, she injects herself with embalming fluid, just to make sure she has an appropriate death.

Each of the adventures in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is a satirical parody of exploration and expansion, but each is also a parody of British society and politics, especially the British society and politics that were in effect during Swift’s life time. Swift’s “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Ireland from being a Burden to their Parents or Country” was carefully structured to read like a proposal that would be seriously placed before the British House of Commons, and the various aspects of his proposal were in fact very similar to proposals that were at the time being placed before Parliament. Similarly, Mark Twain’s “War Prayer” had not only the form of a real prayer, but contained many of the expressions and clichés that could be found in prayers of the day. The “War Prayer” begins “Oh Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells…. Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, and make heavy their steps,” and ends “We ask it in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek his aid. Amen.”

Saturday Night Live is famous for its parodies, and the entire show might just be a parody of itself. A parody of a commercial advertisement is usually shown after the host’s opening monologue. James Signorelli produces the parodies, and much of American culture is parodied, including fast food, beer, feminine hygiene products, toys, clothes, medicines, automobiles, electronics, appliances. Financial Institutions, public-service announcements movies, and TV shows are also often parodied. Celebrities are also parodied. Alec Baldwin parodies Donald J. Trump. Tina Fey parodies Sarah Palin. Amy Poehler parodies Hillary Clinton. There are also excellent parodies of Barach Obama, Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, and others.

Obviously, it is easier for people to enjoy a parody if they know what the original was.

In our increasingly diverse culture, memories of “classic” children’s books may be one of the few things we all have in common. Advertisers, broadcasters, cartoonists, journalists, politicians, bloggers, and everyone else who wants to communicate with large numbers of people, therefore turn to the array of exaggerated characters that we remember from childhood such as Maurice Sendak’s 1962 Where the Wild Things Are, or any of the Dr. Seuss books. Margaret Wise Brown’s 1947 Goodnight Moon is probably the most often parodied children’s book

In fact, a very quick way to make a point is to parody something from children’s literature. Thus Chicken Little represents alarmists; Pinocchio represents liars; The Big Bad Wolfrepresents danger; Humpty Dumpty represents falling from grace; and The Frog Prince gives hope to women of all ages. But the best example of parody is Judith Viorst’s The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day to let us know that people can have terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days, and they can recover from them.

In the 1980s, Alleen’s children’s literature students brought in a full page advertisement from APS (the local power company) showing Dorothy and her friends from The Wizard of Oz (note that The Wizard of Id is a parody of this) happily walking up a brick road with the caption “We’re on our way to more efficient fuel alternatives.” In a later class, students brought in a cartoon in which the Wicked Witch was saying, “Forget the slippers. I want the Tin Man’s Oil!” In the old days when Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall, he was always surrounded by sympathetic bystanders trying to put him back together again. In the saddest cartoon, Dorothy and friends had sold the Tin Man to a recycling center in exchange for bus fare back to Kansas. A cartoon in the fall of 2009 showed the poor fallen egg being shunned by a donkey and two wizard-like characters saying, “Salmonella!”

“This is the House that Jack Built” is a “poem” that is taught to every American child. In the 1980s, there was a full-page ad for U. S. Plywood showing a darling couple standing in a newly paneled room. The adoring wife was proudly saying, “This is the room that Herb paneled!” A recent Tom Beck cartoon showed the proverbial Jack standing near the house he just built with a big screw through his belly. Nearby a bureaucrat and a Supreme Court Justice are holding up EMINENT DOMAIN and PUBLIC USE signs. In a funny cartoon from the 1990s, Gretel was solemnly quizzing the Witch on the nutritional value of the food in her enticing house. In the fall of 2009, a popular televised advertising campaign showed Hansel and Gretel fearfully wandering into Wall Street and dropping bread crumbs along the way in hopes of being able to find their way out. In the 1980s, the Little Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe was happy to be a huckster for Hawaiian Punch as she happily served it to all of her children while keeping to her modest budget. A later cartoon of her house is boarded up with a FORECLOSURE sign on it. In a second cartoon a realtor is standing in front of it, and saying to a colleague, “It looked kinda dumpy, but appraised at a million-two.”

Jeffrey Katzenberg worked for the Walt Disney Corporation from 1975 to 1984. He left in disappointment when he did not get the promotion he thought he deserved. In 1994, he joined Steven Spielberg and David Geffen to form Dreamworks. One of the first things they did was to create the “Shrek” films with the purposeful intention of “getting even” with Disney by parodying such Disney icons as Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, Dumbo, The Little Mermaid, Peter Pan, Pinocchio, and Sleeping Beauty.

Many movies are parodies of cultures or of books. Woody Allen’s Bananas makes fun of the military solutions that the United States invokes on third-world countries. As a parody of a parody, the movie also contains Howard Cosell’s play-by-play description, as though on Wide World of Sports, of the consummation of the marriage of Fielding Melish and Norma, an ingenue devoting her life to third-world causes.

Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is a parody targeting pulp fiction, religion, and the criminal world. More specifically, it parodies the flamboyant characters, mystery, and personal greed found in thriller fiction novels. The setting is Los Angeles, some of it at Jack Rabbit Slim’s place--“a wax museum with a pulse.” Four interlocking stories circle around a cast of bumbling robbers, real gangsters, the Boss, and the Boss’s wife, whose hairdo and dress are perfect for the cover of a sleazy novel. In all the episodes, Marsellus, the Boss, watches jealously over Mia, his wife. A man who gives her a foot massage is later pushed from the roof of a building. Mia is so passive and ineffectual that viewers don’t know whether the phrase “taking care of the Boss’s wife,” means killing her, protecting her, or providing her with sex. In a memorable scene, two gangsters go over a speed bump, causing a gun to go off in the face of a man they were guarding in the back seat of the car. Almost as shocking is the history of Butch’s gold watch. His father, who during the war was captured and held as a POW, hid the precious gold watch in his anus for five years. Just before being executed, he passed it on to another POW who also hid it in his anus for a number of years. At last, the watch makes its way home and the grateful and loving Butch keeps it on his bedside table.

The violence of Pulp Fiction is almost like the violence in a Tom-and-Jerry cartoon. In one scene, bullets whiz back and forth, but through what looks like divine intervention, Vince and Jules remain alive and unharmed. Also, right out of a cartoon is the scene where Butch is looking for a weapon: First, he finds a hammer, then a bat, then a chainsaw, and finally a huge Samurai sword.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a parody about the romances, the wars, and the quests of the Middle Ages. When King Arthur fights the Black Knight, he cuts off the knight’s arms and both of his legs, but the Black Knight still taunts King Arthur and wants to continue to fight. During their adventures, the knights have to cross the bridge of death, where three questions are asked: “What is your name?” “What is your quest?” and “What is your favorite color?” Much of the humor comes from how difficult these questions become for some of the knights. The violence, killing, and bloodshed are all justified in the name of Christianity. In an anachronistic ending, the police arrive, dressed in modern British uniforms, and load King Arthur and the others into a paddy wagon. There is also a plague scene with men pulling carts through the village shouting “bring out your dead. When a sick man is thrown onto the cart, he protests, “I’m not dead yet.” So somebody hits him on the head. Now he is dead.

Characters in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian are given such names as Nautius Maximus, Biggus Dickus, and Incontinentia Buttocks. The movie takes place in Bethlehem during the time of Christ--or more specifically, on Saturday afternoon at tea time. This parody film satirically targets religion, ritual, and blind faith. When Brian of Nazareth is asked if he is the Messiah, he says, “No,” and the villagers respond, “Only the true Messiah denies his divinity.” Brian becomes a sacred icon, along with his sandal and his gourd. When the Christians ask, “What have the Romans ever done for us?” the response is “aqueducts, sanitation, roads, irrigation, medicine, education, wine, public baths, peace.” There is confusion over whether Myrrh is a “balm” or a “bomb.” The Israelites are referred to as the “Red Sea pedestrians.” When the Christians write on the walls of the palace, “Romans eunt domus,” meaning “Romans go home,” the Romans who see the graffiti are totally oblivious to the meaning as they go about correcting the grammar. The movie ends with Brian and other Christians hanging from crosses, but doggedly singing, “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”

Mel Brooks specialized in writing movie-script parodies. Brooks wrote “Blazing Saddles,” “Robin Hood, Men in Tights,” “Young Frankenstein,” and “The Producers.” The plot line of “The Producers” is that the producers heavily insure a play that they are sure will be a flop—but it is so bad that it is a great hit. One of the funniest scenes is when all of the various “Hitlers” are auditioning for the part with their stiff-legged marches, their Hitler mustaches, and their “Heil Hitler” salutes.

The Monty Python group wrote and starred in “The Holy Grail,” “Meaning of Life,” and “The Life of Brian.” The final scene of this last movie shows Brian being crucified, and all of the people being crucified on all of their crosses are singing “Always think of the bright…side…of life. / Ta da, Ta da da da da da.”

Americans like to make fun of European high-brow music. That’s why Nashville, Tennessee is famous for its Grand Ol’ Opry. That’s also why an opera that comes to America, often becomes a Broadway Musical. Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (set in Japan) became David Henry Hwangs’s M. Butterfly (set in China). Puccini’s La Boheme became Bruce Guthrie’s Rent. This can also happen with books, as when Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist became Lionel Bart and John Green’s Oliver, or when Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz became Charlie Smalls’s The Wiz (with only black actors), or became Stephen Schwartz’s Wicked (the story told from the point view of the Wicked Witch of the West. Puccini’s Madama Butterfly became Miss Saigon. In both, an American service man and an Asian lady fall deeply in love. When the battle is over the service man returns to America, where he marries an American girl. When the service man returns with his new family to Asia the Asian lady commits Hari-Kari (suicide). Georges Bizet’s Carmen became Oscar Hamerstein’s Carmen Jones. In the Broadway Musical version, all of the characters are black.

In order to commemorate her 79thbirthday, Julie Andrews made a special appearance at Manhattan’s Radio City Music Hall for the benefit of AARP. One of the musical numbers she performed was an updated version of “My Favorite Things” from “The Sound of Music. Here are the new lyrics:

Boxtops and nose drops and needles for knitting,

Walkers and handrails and new dental fittings,

Bundles of magazines tied up in string,

These are a few of my favourite things.

Cadillacs, cataracts, hearing aids and glasses,

Polident, Fixodent, false teeth in glasses,

Pacemakers, golf carts and porches with swings,

These are a few of my favourite things.

When the pipes leak, When the bones creak,

When the knees go bad,

I simply remember my favourite things,

And then I don’t feel…..so bad.

The reason that Edgar Allan Poe is so often parodied is that his poetic style is so distinct. Poe wrote a poem entitled “Bells” which reads as follows:

Hear the sledges with the bells —

Silver bells!

What a world of merriment their melody foretells!

How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,

In the icy air of night!

While the stars that over sprinkle

All the heavens, seem to twinkle

With a crystalline delight;

Keeping time, time, time,

In a sort of Runic rhyme,

To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells

From the bells, bells, bells, bells,

Bells, bells, bells —

From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

An anonymous writer wrote the following parody of Poe’s “Bells”:

Hear the fluter with his flute,

Silver flute!

Oh, what a world of wailing is awakened by its toot!

How it demi-semi quavers

On the maddened air of night!

And defieth all endeavors

To escape the sound or sight

Of the flute, flute, flute,

With its tootle, tootle, toot

Of the flute, flewt, fluit, floot, Phlute, Phlewt, Phlewght,

And the tootle, tootle, tooting of its toot.

Poe’s Anabelle Lee is also often parodied. Barbara Angell’s parody of Anabelle Lee is entitled, “Ulabel Lume,” and the parody reads as follows:

I was a child and she was a child

And childishly childlike we’d romp.

But we loved with a lovelier love than love

In this old barge on the swamp.

With a love that made the winged seraphs in heaven

Foam at the mouth and stomp.

Probably the most famous parody of all times may or may not have been a parody. On January 29, 1845, Edgar Allan Poe published “The Raven” in the New York Evening Mirror. The poem reads as follows:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore —

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

“ ’Tis some visiter,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door —

Only this and nothing more.”

Before Poe had published “The Raven,” Holly Chivers has written a poem entitled, “Isidore,” which reads as follows.

While the world lay round me sleeping

I alone for Isadore

Patient Vigils lonely keeping,

Someone said to me while weeping:

“Why this grief forever more?”

And I answered: “I am weeping

for my blessed Isadore.

Chivers was very offended by Poe’s “The Raven,” feeling that Poe had stolen his own poem, “Isidore.” So Chivers wrote a poem which was a parody both of Poe’s “The Raven,” and of his own “Isidore.” Chiver’s parody was entitled, “Humpty Dumpty A La Poe,” and it read as follows:

As an egg, when broken, never

Can be mended but must ever

Be the same crushed egg forever—

So shall this dark heart of mine

Which, though broken, is still breaking,

And shall nevermore cease aching

For the sleep which has no waking—

For the sleep which now is thine.

We are surrounded by parody from Mel Brooks, to Woody Allen, and from Monty Python, and Saturday Night Life to The Harvard Lampoon, MAD Magazine, MAD TV, National Lampoon, The Onion, and so on. Sometimes the clues that something is a parody are obvious; sometimes they are subtle. So be careful not to be punked by a well-written, but very subtle parody.

References

Highet, Gilbert. 2015. The Anatomy of Satire, Classical Edition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Hutcheon, Linda. 1985. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. New York, NY: Methuen.

Trivigno, Franco V. 2009. “The Rhetoric of Parody in Plato’s Menexenus.” In Philosophy and Rhetoric, 42.1, 30 pp.

Yan, Gao. 1996. The Art of Parody: Maxine Hong Kingston’s Use of Chinese Sources. New York, NY: Peter Lang.