Tobacco Road. I mean the novel by Erskine Caldwell: the movie was intentionally silly.
Paula Deen’s cooking show.
A lot of The Moody Blues’ and Uriah Heep’s ouerve.
Late career Paul Harvey.
The writings of Carlos Castaneda, and I’m still not convinced they’re not.
Videos of marble-racing with sports announcers. This one, I have to admit, once I realized it was light-hearted fun rather than a parody of anything in particular, has kind of grown on me.
Election results from England. It was even more ridiculous than the Monty Python parody.
Hell, Election results from the last election here!
Born to Run. First time it came on the radio, I thought it was a hilarious parody of an overwrought Phil Spector teenage boy and girl tearjerker.
I still think that.
Back in the 1990s, when MTV at least still showed some music videos, I was channel surfing and came across a show hosted by Weird Al. The basic format was, as I recall, they would show the original video, followed by the Weird Al parody video. And then they showed the video for The Crash Test Dummies’ song “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm”. I honestly wasn’t sure it that was the original, serious video, or the parody.
Sorta: local alternative rock station switched formats to Latin music one day at noon, without announcing it beforehand (as they often don’t). Several of us tuned in on the way home from work and listened for several minutes. After a bit I started wondering if Carlos Santana had died or something; finally a station break came on–in Spanish–and I figured it out.
A newspaper in El Salvador featured a front page story about Trump. It turned out that his picture was actually one of Alec Baldwin imitating Trump.
I remember I was on a road trip with my Mom once…not sure where we were, but away from home, and riding down the road in the dark early morning, we heard “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” by Bobby McFerrin. We figured it was some local station’s novelty song, and laughed our butts off. Any little thing went wrong on that trip, one of us would intone, “Doan worry, be happ-ey now” and we’d bust up again.
Let me correct myself. It was a newspaper in the Dominican Republic.
The picture is hilarious!
Back in about 1976 I was wathcing TV in a bus station in Omaha on one of those chairs with a TV built in and you could watch a half hour for a quarter. Anyway, there was this commercial for the VW Thing. it was so weird. Because I was tired, and the atmosphere of watching TV in a bus station, I thought I dreamed it.* Later I saw it at home, and realized it was real.
It doesn’t seem to be available on the internet anywhere.
“You can have it with the top up, the top down, the doors off, the windshield down. It’s a car that feels at home whereever you feel at home.”
Sounds like the first minute of this.
I had some of the words wrong, but hey it’s been 45 years.
You can see how one could believe they imagined that.
I’ve always wanted to get two, and weld them together into a six-door or even an eight door Thing.
A Kubelwagen! I’ve always wanted one painted in Afrika Korps colors. 
After seeing the awful movie Entrapment, I remember walking out of the cinema in Riga thinking it had to be a parody of a heist flick. To this day, I’m not convinced it wasn’t.
And I still want my money back! 
Not a whole show but just an individual scene from legends of tomorrow.
Season3 spoiler below
Given Franz Drameh’s melodramatic overacting. I was sure that the death of Martin Stein was a parody and he was going to turn out not to be dying at all. I kept waiting for the punchline until it I slowly realized that this was being played for drama rather than laughs. It’s overall a good show but that is hands down the worst death scene I’ve ever seen.
I think the most ridiculous single scene from a TV show that was (apparently) meant absolutely seriously is this scene from One Tree Hill. It doesn’t even work as someone’s sick idea of a parody. I never watched One Tree Hill, so I think I only saw this scene by itself, perhaps as something that someone linked to or as just the scene by itself on YouTube. It never occurred to me that it was actually a scene from a drama series:
First thing I thought of when reading the thread title was the Trumpy Bear commercial. The first few times I saw it I thought it was a joke. I’m still convinced it was created by a bunch of frat boys passing around a bong and trying to top each other with the most ridiculous commercial ever.
A few years back, Ralph Lauren sold polo shirts with ridiculously oversized logos:
One of my college buddies and I thought these were hilarious. Like they were designed as a parody of excessively preppy frat guys down at the Jersey Shore or something.
Actually, I recall one time when travelling in Europe with my wife, I was unable to sleep and turned on the TV. The only thing on was what I assumed was some cheesy knock-off of the film ‘Hostel’. Turns out, it was actually the film ‘Hostel’ (which I had never seen).
A buddy of mine is an Old China Hand. He has spent decades there. Once, while back in the State he happened to see the exercise guru Richard Simmons on TV. Of course he assumed it was some crude homophobic parody.
Roger Moore’s Bond movie ‘Moonraker’
It got panned at the time (1979) by critics for being like a parody. A ludicrous scene of a hovercraft in Venice Square, the villains were so bad, the sci-fi tropes and gadgets. This was seen as laughable in the experimental era of special effects and spy comedy … and it’s aged even worse.
To show how bad I think of it, there are genuine spy parody movies from those days that watching now are more realistic than this real Bond franchise movie.