The Art of Parody

Parodies. Those lovely creations that seem to come attached with obnoxiously long titles, a bevy of swear words, and an occasionally irritating number of clichés. As a way of writing that’s slowly emerging as a credible story genre, there are a lot of questions surrounding it.

The number one rule of parodies is to not try too hard. Please. There is a difference between being funny, and being irritating. When writing a parody, do not overuse the tools of the trade; clichés, caricature characters, pathetic dialogue and clichés. Yes, if you’re writing an emo parody, your character should be overly emo. No, they should not cut every fifteen seconds to express their inner pain. That’s not funny, and it’s not a good caricature. It’s just…weird and totally unrealistic. Your parodies need to be at least slightly believable; they can’t be totally out there. Realism is required to ground a story, and to exaggerate the parody elements.

The second rule is to be funny, without being offensive. Saying ‘Justin Bieber and his fans suck, lolwhut?’ is not funny, it’s rude. The art of parody is to make fun of something in a laughable way. That laughable way might be slightly offensive, but it should be clear that it’s all in the spirit of a joke…not just plain out declaring something is stupid and sneaking in a lolwhut at the end of it. As well, having a ton of swear words or grammatical mistakes in your story doesn’t make it a parody. While you may be parodying people who are known to swear, and thus amping up that aspect of their personality…having a story littered with swear words can be pretty annoying. Same goes for grammatical and spelling mistakes; don’t get too carried away in the spirit of your text speaking character. Make sure your story is readable and understandable (As well as Mibba rule following).

The third rule is to remember that you’re still writing a story. It still needs to have a plot, it still needs to have a beginning, a middle, and an ending. It still needs to go somewhere. Twenty pages of caricaturing the Jonas Brothers does not make a parody, because that’s not a story. The concept of the story itself, should reflect what you’re parodying. If you’re doing a parody story of the typical fanfic, then your story should be the typical fanfic…just written with the tone of a parody. If you’re parodying a person, then they probably should be the main character, but they still need a story to be in. Preferably, the story would be based on their real life exploits. For instance, if you wished to parody Justin Bieber, you could take the real life incident of someone chucking a water bottle at him, and give it a Cinderalla twist, with the water bottle being the glass slipper.

And above all, remember not to take it too seriously…because the very definition of a parody is ‘a humorous or satirical imitation of a serious piece of literature or writing.’