“It marks the intersection of creation and re-creation, of invention and critique.”
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Parody is a form of meaning-making where something is replicated and exaggerated in order to make a point. Typically, these exaggerations are meant to highlight absurdity and ridiculousness in the original.
Parody is closely associated with humor, and in general we think of parody as poking fun at the original. Humor is an important part of this conjunction and its efficacy as a mode of criticism. As for how humor actually comes to be, philosopher Simon Critchley offers that it is produced by “the experience of a felt incongruity between what we know or expect to be the case, and what actually takes place in the joke.”
Critchley writes that humor has political use in that it reveals possibilities for better futures.
“Humour both reveals the situation, and indicates how that situation might be changed. […] Laughter lets us see the folly of the world in order to imagine a better world in its place, and to change the situation in which we find ourselves”
Linda Hutcheon, however, notes in her seminal text “A Theory of Parody,” that this political use has a paradoxical effect. While parody sets up the conditions for critique, it also simultaneously recognizes the legitimacy of the original.
This paradox of legalized though unofficial subversion is characteristic of all parodic discourse insofar as parody posits, as a prerequisite to its very existence, a certain aesthetic institutionalization which entails the acknowledgement of recognizable, stable forms and conventions. These function as norms or as rules which can - and therefore, of course, shall - be broken. The parodic text is granted a special licence to transgress the limits of convention, but, as in the carnival, it can do so only temporarily and only within the controlled confines authorized by the text parodied - that is, quite simply, within the confines dictated by "recognizability.”
“In parodic repetition, difference is a necessary defining characteristic; but sameness is not […] merely obliterated. Parody manages to inscribe continuity while permitting critical distance and change.
Satire is something similar, where some element of derision is used to provide commentary; but we specifically think of satire as commenting on politics, power dynamics, or contemporary issues. By contrast, parody could be about something very general and non-political in its criticism. Much could be said about the differences between parody and satire, and certainly that is an interesting question to be had. But for our course’s purposes, we will think of these two as forces operating in conjunction.