Parody

Parody and Satire

Alex Baldwin has been on the cover of Vanity Fair. He has become a Trump caricature on SNL. Everyone knows Tina Fey and her Palin doppelganger.

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 citation comes from John Dryden in 1693, who also appended an explanation, suggesting that the word was in common use, meaning to make fun of or re-create what you are doing.

Vladimir Nabokov made a distinction: "Satire is a lesson, parody is a game."

What we are seeing now as entertainment is a very sly distortion of parody into satire, where something funny is presented as having inherent meaning. Imagine a high school where everyone began to lisp like one student, or limp like one student. Imagine a school where the white 90% of the student body came to class in black face. Parody, yes. Funny, no. The point of attack, the subject of the humor is belittling  in nature, cruel in intent and overwhelming in its volume. And there is no lesson.

MacBird was play in New York in 1967  that was a parody of MacBeth but in that parody was something really very serious:  The suggestion that Lyndon Johnson was responsible for JFK's death.


Sarah Palin never said “I can see Russia from my house.” Tina Fey did. During an interview with Palin in September of 2008, ABC’s Charlie Gibson posed this question: “What insight into Russian actions, particularly during the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of this state give you?” She gave an earnest, but widely ridiculed, response: “They’re our next-door neighbors. And you can actually see Russia, from land, here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.”
Russia as our neighbors! How absurd! What a hick!


Parody requires some strength in its target; its target must not be weak or vulnerable. You can always tell when parody loses its essence: When it becomes righteous. And relentless. And, most important, when it becomes cruel.