I was thinking last night about Mel Brooks and how his parodies range from excellent (Young Frankenstien) to abombinal (Dracula: Dead and Loving It), and began to realize that I could not quantify what makes a parody good or bad. Obviously, there’s more than just a single reason and everyone had a different reaction, so what do you consider good (or bad) parody and why? Be (scene) specific
Two scenes popped almost immediately into my head when thinking of examples of both.
Good: Carmen Electra, in Scary Movie (parodying Drew Barrymore’s role in Scream), in her undies, stops in the middle of some sprinklers to give some hot modeling moves. I didn’t find it funny so much because it was making fun of Scream, but because it was making fun of models, especially those who will use any opportunity to show off their hot bodies (i.e. even when being chased by a killer who’s already ripped off your clothes). The fact that it was Carmen Electra doing it… well, I’m a sucker for self-mockery.
Bad: In (I think) Spy Hard, after Leslie Nielsen tells the tall tale, the one guy realizes it and drops his coffee cup in shock (a la The Usual Suspects). Then a whole bunch of other stuff drops on it as well. First, it’s not funny to simply repeat a scene from another movie and then redo it again and again with other objects. Secondly, focusing so much time on what, at the most, was a small joke, only magnified how hollow it was. Now if the one guy had dropped his coffee cup, and maybe in the background a second guy dropped something else in shock, and a third guy dropped something totally ludicrous (like his arm, which then shatters as well), then something might have been funny.
Humor is soooo hard to quantify. That said, I think the key to good parody is to do something unexpected that, upon reflection, makes sense in another different context.
Carmen Electra’s scene = unexpected, but logical once you switch the context from horrow movie to modeling, with the link being Carmen herself. Funny.
Dracula = there’s no “twist” to another context to make it funny. It’s just a straight reference to another movie repeated. As you say, if there had then been a shot of, oh, I don’t know, a vampire dropping a vial of holy water and melting his foot off. I don’t know if that’s actually funny, but you get the idea.
Good parody reveals something that was actually in the original work, possibly unintentionally (like the gay themes in Top Gun or the girly preening in Pumping Iron). Bad parody tries to pair the original with something that absolutely was never there and makes no sense trying to match them up (like giving James Bond a fixation with boogers, or having a Jane Austen heroine fart a lot).
Austin Powers was a great parody of the 007 films and of 60s culture in general, held up as a contrast to 90s society as kind of a funhouse mirror. Galaxina, intended as a parody of science fiction, failed because the director had no particular affinity or understanding for his own subject matter; it wound up looking like a porn video without the nudity or sexual content. Natural Born Killers (More properly intended as a satire than a parody, but stick with me on this) had the script, actors and heavy cultural themes to be one of the great commentaries on violent pop culture, but was undercut by the absolute humorlessness of its own director; properly handled, it would have looked a lot more like From Dusk Til Dawn.
The best parodies, whether they’re movies, television or short stories, are actually homages or pastiches of the lead character or genre, made by people who honestly like the subject matter they’re teasing. But as fans, they aren’t afraid to poke fun at the essential silliness of certain conventions and attitudes that are inherent in each. As JSexton and Krokodil suggested, if the parody is of an older work, they may take a closer look at subtext that might only could have been implied in an earlier era.
Mel Brooks’ brilliant BLAZING SADDLES is probably my all-time favorite parody, because it savages at least two dozen western conventions and still has the energy and wit to make commentary on everything from American race relations to black male sexual myths to Hollywood idolry to filmmaking itself.
The worst parodies tend to do illogical attempts at humor that don’t derive from the characters or sitation and frankly, are made by people who don’t have the wit to mock a subject matter they know and love well. My two favorite music mockumentaries (aside from THIS IS SPINAL TAP) are two rap-themed movies called CB4 and FEAR OF A BLACK HAT. CB4 is just silly, dumb and continues to validate my opinion that Chris Rock needs to stick to observational stand-up. FEAR OF A BLACK HAT actually takes the time to develop its characters – but a lot of the movie’s humor depend on the audience having more than a general knowledge of mid-80s rap and hip-hop personalities, events and song lyrics, so a lot of jokes will go whooshing by if you’re not in on the music.
Also, a good parody will demonstrate that the people behind it have such thorough knowledge of nearly every little aspect of the original work/genre, that a viewer, in addition to picking up the obvious send-up points, will say, “I barely realized it, but that is true about the original.” Another good example of this is the Police Squad! TV series (which later became The Naked Gun movies). Although the show ran only six episodes, they managed to hit nearly every TV cop-show cliche`from the previous thirty years (e.g., the stoolie shoeshine boy who has the inside dope on everything, the “throw gun once you run out of bullets” scenes, and “the final credits role over ‘freeze-frame’ of last scene”). Police Squad! was so effective in parodying the genre of pre-1981 cop shows, that I could never take most them seriously ever again.
For paraody to be good, it has to reflect the source material as closely as possible.
Take, for example, Celebrity Jeopardy on SNL. It’s an almost slavish copy of the real thing. Both the inanity of the questions and the insanity of the answers are only slightly removed from reality.
The OP mentions Young Frankenstein. All the ingridients of James Whale’s original are there. Especially the set dressing, the lighting and editing. Mel Brooks obviously loved and respected the originals, and this was his tribute (that’s pronounced try boot).
The one fault with AP is that it’s really only a parody of one Bond film. You Only Live Twice, if I remember correctly. Doesn’t make it less funny, but it really lessened by appreciation of it as a parody when I found out that instead of spoofing Bond as a whole, they were carbon-copying big chunks of one movie.
On the same line, I thought Galaxy Quest could’ve been a funnier movie if it had been a general sci-fi parody instead of only going after Star Trek. It’s hard to spoof one movie and keep it interesting for the length of a whole movie. Look at High Anxiety. (I have the feeling some of the other Hitchcock references were thrown in there because somebody realized this.) It’s got some great bits, but it’s better when it’s not just being Vertigo. You know, you could probably make every point in this thread just using Brooks movies.
So here’s my thought: a good parody can’t be too broad or too specific. I agree with Askia and the other posters that it has to show detailed knowledge of what it’s parodying, you can go too far with it.
I think that for a parody to work, it has to be obviously a labor of love.
You can’t make a good parody of something that you don’t love - you’ll either not hit the cliches hard enough, or you’ll hit them too hard. On top of which, however, you can’t make the parody all in jokes, because you’ll limit your audience only to those people who love the original. That’s a hard balancing act to work.
I can’t really comment on many parodies: Aside from Spaceballs I haven’t really seen enough parodies of films or film genres that I really liked to be an accurate judge. Don’t get me wrong, I love YF and BS. (Own 'em both on LD, even) But I really don’t know enough of either genre to say how effective either stands as a parody, really. Instead I can talk about how much fun they are to someone who doesn’t know the genres or films being parodied that well.
At one point I tried to write a parody of James Bond. In my defense I was young and callow. I had much of the attempted humor to be tied up in twisting the sexual identidy of my Bond-a-like. (Instead of being a ladykiller, he thought he had a way with the men.) I also worked in a replacement for Jaws: Finn, a cybernetically enhanced Emporer Penguin with monomolecular blades in its wings.
The basic ideas were very amusing, not just to me, but to people I’d shared 'em with. The problem was, making a workable parody I lacked the appreciation of Bond to make it work. My dislike of Bond just kept coming through, and ruining the humor, even for me. Let alone for anyone else.
Most of the bad parodies I’ve seen fall into that category.
Good ones are a bit harder to list. Mel Brooks has several, of course. Silent Movie is great fun, as well as some of the others mentioned. I personally think that The Mask was more parody than anything else, and it worked because of that. I also found that the Schwartzenagger film Last Action Hero was more parody than anything else, and I think it died in the theatres because they didn’t market as such.
Harvard Lampoon’s Bored of the Rings works best when it shows off its attention to detail – when it parodies the maps and footnotes, and in drawing caricatures of the peoples and characters. (IMHO the authors weren’t too good at writing a story, so it tails off a bit. The best parts are the preface and first few chapters.)
This was not just a parody of Star Trek but also a loving satire of Trekkies, Star Trek conventions, and sci-fi fandom in general. The fans appreciated it, which is why they voted to give it the Hugo award in 2000.
That’s what I meant when I said it’s a parody of JUST Star Trek. They only spoofed one show throughout the movie, and I think the parody of the fan base was very particular to Trek also. I’m not saying it wasn’t loving or that Trekkies didn’t appreciate it, I’m saying it could’ve been funnier.
I’ve been to sci-fi conventions. I grant that it’s been a few years since I saw the movie. Given the fact that Trekkies are so well-known and other sci-fi fanbases aren’t, and that the rest of the movie is so specific to Star Trek, I couldn’t really interpret that one part of the movie as something general.
Actually, I think the best part of Galaxy Quest is that they didn’t play it strictly as a parody – while it does spoof and mock much of Star Trek and sci-fi, there’s also a very strong sense of respect for the fans, their favorite shows, and the people behind them. The actors grow as characters, the fans are ultimately admired for their “expertise,” and the fandom itself is rewarded in the end.
If it was just a straight-up yukfest, Galaxy Quest would have been an enjoyable, but quickly-forgotten, comedy.
Shaun of the Dead- parodies, lionizes and one-ups every zombie movie cliche for the past 30 years, with a particular debt paid to trailblazer Caesar Romero.
I’m Gonna Git You, Sucka! If you ever saw one blaxploitation movie you loved, you owe it to yourself to see this. Blaxploitation archetypes band together to battle “The Man.”
Murder By Death - A neat little movie that gathers together every major armchair detective and sleuth since Sherlock Holmes to solve a murder
Scary Movie - Brilliantly mocks the Scream franchise and the guts and horror movie genre in general
Anchorman: the Legend of Ron Jeremy. for the street rumble scene alone
Lousy Parodies:
Don’t Be A Menace To Society While Drinking Your Juice In The Hood Ugh. Shows no love for the 'hood movies of the early '90’s – just 90 minutes of unfunny mocking. AND?
Soapdish. Ugh. Tepid, stupid, forced and sanitized, Could have been, should have been, much funnier.
Bugsy Malone. It ain’t satire. It ain’t drama. It ain’t comedy. It MUST be parody. An all kids’ cast play Prohibition-era gangsters. So badly conceived it makes me type the next sentence backwards: smoking they were fuck the what?
Jane Austen’s Mafia! For the title alone, may the gods of cinema usher thy eternal soul to perdition. You’d have to go aways to top the stupidity of that.
Cannibal Women in the Avacado Jungle of Death… anytime I find myself taking Bill Mahr seriously, I just recall this flick.
