Parodies often delight in pointing out works' contradictions and silly nature. But sometimes, parodies mistakenly spoof a work that's intentionally contradictory or silly. The spoof writer misses the point of the original, mocking it for entirely intended qualities.

Similarly, parodies often play with original works by throwing in silliness of their own. But the writer may underestimate the original's capacity for incongruous situations, characterization or dialogue, falsely thinking such elements will necessarily parody the source. The result is a silly work but one that duplicates the original rather than mocking it.

For parodies that understand the original's irony and seek to mock the irony itself, see Spoofing Spoofiness.

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Examples

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[[folder:Fan Works]]

• Team Four Star's Dragon Ball Abridged played the Ginyu Force as a parody of sentai anime series. The Ginyu on the original Dragon Ball already WAS a parody of said animes, so they didn't actually add anything new with that.

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[[folder:Film]]

• The second Johnny English film received some criticism for this. The films present themselves as parodies of Bond films -- all of which(with the exception of the Timothy Dalton and Daniel Craig films) are so over-the-top and tongue-in-cheek that the entire genre of "James Bond parody" is completely superfluous.

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[[folder:Live Action TV]]

• One of the very last Bob Hope specials on NBC tried to lampoon the 1989 Batman movie, and had Hope done up as Jack Nicholson's Joker. The dialogue had a light, derisive tone that evidently conflicted with the writers' view of serious superheroes and supervillains. Actually, the Joker takes this exact tone (he is named "the Joker" after all) and even volleyed the same sort of insults in the real movie as those the special featured.
• Cirque de Soleil parodies often ignore the fact that the shows are often extremely funny and not simply two hours of posing and pretentiousness.
• A particular problem with British comedy shows in The Eighties was impressionists "doing" people like "Dame Edna Everage", "Frank Spencer" and "Inspector Clouseau", completely ignoring the fact that these were already comedy caricatures created by Barry Humphries, Michael Crawford and Peter Sellers respectively, leaving absolutely nothing left to parody.
  • The Office both parodies and invokes this trope; David Brent, the manager, fancies himself a genius comedian, but the very fact that his 'act' is basically limited to riffing on these kind of characters is a pretty clue that ultimately he's got nothing.
• Andrea Martin of SCTV once remarked that the only show they couldn't satirize was Laverne And Shirley, because they couldn't come up with any situation that was more ridiculous than what the show already did.
• Parodies of the Energizer Bunny, which tend to forget that one of the Bunny's original gimmicks was interrupting absurd parody commercials. That they all make the same joke (stretching the "it keeps going and going" line until it becomes annoying) doesn't help.
• MAD Tv did a parody music of Jewel's Intuition video and 0304 pop album, labeling her a pop sellout... except that video and album were satire of the then current teen pop trend. The Intuition original video featured such mockery as texts reading "Jewel's voice sounds much better now that she's dancing" and a pyrotechnics performance that ended with the fire department's arrival.

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[[folder:Music]]

• There's a "response" to The Lonely Island's "Jizz In My Pants" called "Puke In My Mouth". Those behind it fail to see the original was a parody, self-deprecating and actually funny. The result is you get a bunch of attractive women who spend the entire song mocking other people.
• Ray Stevens' song "Teenage Mutant Kung Fu Chickens" spoofed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which was itself a parody of Frank Miller's Ronin among others. There was also a whole genre of Ninja Turtles parody knockoffs of which Stevens appears unaware when he made his own parody knockoff.

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[[folder:Video Games]]

• Pretty much all the stuff that's played for laughs (like stupid guards and rescuing hostages on the toilet) in Mesal Gear Solid, the Metal Gear parody in Ape Escape 3, is stuff that was played for laughs (or at least played non-seriously) in the actual series. The ending line of the PAL version ("I go wherever the wind takes me. So long as war never ends, I will always have a place in this world.") would not sound remotely out of place in the actual games - the canon is already so deliberately over-the-top that it's pretty much impossible to parody.

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[[folder:Western Animation]]

• The old cartoon Batfink is basically a spoof of... the silly Adam West Batman show. Which was a spoof of superheroes to begin with.

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