What is a Parody — Definition and Examples in Film

We can trace the history of parodies back to ancient Greece via the parodia, a poetic style meant to mock the style and structure of epics. The Greeks set the stage for “anything goes” parody-law, which is to say that even the Gods weren’t beyond being parodied.

Aristophanes’s play The Frogs (~405 BCE) was one of the first recorded examples of a produced parody. The play follows the God of theater, Dionysus, as he travels to the underworld to meet the great deceased playwrights of Greece. Here’s a breakdown of The Frogs by Course Hero.

The Frogs is widely lauded not just for its historical importance but its comedic story as well; its parodic qualities lie in how it lampoons various deities. 

Some other famous examples of parody in literature include Henry Beard and Douglas Kenney’s Bored of the Rings (which parodies J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings), Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (which parodies Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice), and Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone (which parodies Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind). These works are just the tip of the iceberg for the parody literary definition.

Whats a Movie Parody?

Parody movie examples

Movie parodies have been around for just about as long as cinema. Over the years, they’ve grossed hundreds of millions of dollars and mocked countless iconic films. 

Here are a few of the most famous movie parodies:

THE AUSTIN POWERS FRANCHISE

The spy movie genre is no stranger to movie parodies; take Get Smart, Agent Cody Banks, and Spy for example. But perhaps the best spy movie parodies are the Austin Powers movies; which star Mike Myers as the eponymous mockery of James Bond.

Check out Austin Powers director Jay Roach break down the opening scene of Goldmember below.

Galaxy Quest parodies the Star Trek franchise by exposing the ludicrous while celebrating the irreverent. To this day, it remains one of the best examples of how to send up a beloved intellectual property.

MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL AND MONTY PYTHON’S LIFE OF BRIAN

In this example, The Onion parodies U.S. politics without any specific targets, thus begging us to question: is it parody or satire? And that’s a tricky question to answer. Many scholars on the subject argue that there’s too little difference between the two to make a difference in court. 

We typically regard parody as something that mocks a specific target and satire as something that mocks something else. But is “politics” a “specific target” or something else? Films are allowed to send up entire genres for example – shouldn’t sketches be allowed to do the same? Something to consider for anybody interested in parodies.

There’s a perception in the entertainment industry that “parody law” – which the appellate courts of the United States’s Second, Ninth, and Eleventh circuits ruled was admissible under Title 17 of the United States Code fair use clause – can permit anybody to use comedic exaggeration on all intellectual properties. 

That’s a bit misleading. The truth is that parody law often only goes as far as its lawyers take it. Take this example from Nathan For You for example.