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Ahem, sorry. Let me focus up here. Okay! So! For my comedic growth this week I decided to take a closer look at parodies. Now I don't know about you guys, but when I hear the word "parody" I immediately think about Weird Al. He knew how to make a parody- take something that already exists, change the words, or the characters, or the situations, and make it into something even better. Now that may seem like a lazy art at first... but waiiiit, the bulk of the work is already done, just replace some words of a great piece of art and you've got yourself a parody I can hear you typing furiously into the comment box, and, well, you're right on the money. Parodies are just mutations of existing works of art. Seeing as how I'm the laziest person in the world, I appreciate that the formula is simple, but making it into something worthwhile may get a little tougher. What's harder than coming up with something funny? Trying to make unfunny things funny (see: me when I have to submit these blogs).
And while I'd love to talk about the king of parodies himself Weird Al and bust out my lyrical knowledge of "Eat It" right here and now, I think that I may take a more modern look at parodies- the parody sketches of Saturday Night Live. These types of sketches have been done on SNL since it started- from Schmitts Gay of the Farley and Sandler days to the recent Real Housewives of Disney sketch that debuted last week. What is so great about these parodies is that neither of them involved a huge creative leap- Schmitts Gay is literally every. single. beer commercial but replaces the swimsuit model women with flamboyant men. And the housewives sketch practically writes itself because it just threw in a different group of women into the already outrageous show. I'm relatively certain they could have just placed Jasmine and Cinderella in an actual scene from the show, and I wouldn't have been able to tell the difference, but I digress. Both commercials follow the format of what they are poking fun at, just with a few things changed- beer commercials involve outrageously attractive people gyrating in the water and the housewives are a constantly drunken hair-pulling mess of crazy bitches.
The creativity and hilarity of parodies just comes from the fact that it's almost exactly the same as the original- just with one aspect tweaked. Asking yourself simple questions like "What if the bosses on Undercover Boss were easily recognizable mascots instead of the bosses themselves?" or "What would happen if commercials for medicines illustrated every single side effect instead of showing people enjoying themselves?" starts a whole creative process. Writing a parody is as easy as 1, 2, 3- finding something worth creating a parody of, tweaking a certain dimension of it, then writing that ish. "Hey, 'virgin' rhymes with 'surgeon'..." Boom. Simple as that.
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