In order for a parody to work, a work of fiction needs to also take on many of the traits of its target. For example, a parody of action films will, inevitably, have to have some action sequences of its own. If it didn't, it wouldn't be so much of a parody as it would be a public mocking of the genre. A parody of Magical Girls would be required to have at least one Magical Girl character or else it would just be mocking the character type. Most of the best parodies actually stand not only as comedy, but also as the particular genre they are a creation of.
However, the line for what defines a parody can often get murky. Besides flat out labeling something as a parody (which is rarely a good sign due to the lack of subtlety involved), the criteria for what defines a parody changes from person to person. Some works of fiction straddle the line, unsure of whether it's a parody or just a quirky entry in the genre it's supposed to be a parody of. This can often lead to Misaimed Fandom when people take a parody dead seriously (or, perhaps due to the Weird Al Effect, are unaware that it even is a parody).
How this happens can vary widely. Perhaps it is just too affectionate of the genre it's a parody of. Perhaps it doesn't go far enough. Perhaps it's just too close to its target. Perhaps it was actually meant to be serious, but took on too many comedic traits. But often, this happens because the writer(s) just couldn't decide what they wanted to do. In any case, an Indecisive Parody is when something is confusing about its intent.
See Stealth Parody for when something very intentionally evokes this to try and get responses as such. And compare Indecisive Deconstruction.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
Axis Powers Hetalia starts off as a hilarious satire of world history, specifically World War II, all contained within the time limit of an Abridged Series, but, within those 5-5 1/2 minutes, it parodies everything imaginable, even Super Robot Genre s, and even manages to have a few heartwarming and tear-jerking moments within the hilarity.
Black Lagoon It is at times hard to tell whether it's an over-the-top parody of the Hollywood action film genre or a straight example with a tendency to occasionally take Refuge in Audacity. The series seems to swing a bit back and forth depending on the arc in question.
Would a satirical parody be considered an option?
Busou Renkin is also somewhere in between, but often seems closer to a very self-aware shounen entry, especially in the second part when the Cerebus Syndrome sneaks in.
Love Hina starts mocking the harem genre hard, inserting audience surrogate Keitaro in a female dorm inhabitated by character prototypes from diverse dating games, in an onsen (making every early episode an onsen episode). It goes so far into comedy land that one wonders if the romantic plot will ever resolve or is it going to go for a Tenchi Solution. But when it wants to get serious it gets serious.
Sailor Moon went from being a parody of the Magical Girl genre to the defining example of the Magical Girl genre. Some of the early episodes are notably more comedic in tone. The later ones? Not so much.
Super Dimension Fortress Macross It's said that this happened here, but that the parody elements didn't last much beyond the first few episodes, then it became a partial deconstruction and partial homage of the genre.
The beginning of it feels like Affectionate Parody. It loses pretty much all semblance of parody after the Time Skip. The base is broken over which period is the best.
Big Trouble in Little China can easily be seen as a straight action movie, rather than the parody it's intended to be, especially if one isn't familiar with the Wuxia tropes it mocks throughout. To be honest, it's not much more over-the-top than many straightforward action flicks.
Condorman is an extraordinarily campy Disney live-action spy flick, but it's so absurd and occasionally self-aware at times that it's hard not to see parody.
Enchanted has elements of both, thus this trope. While it mocks a lot of the tropes of fairy tales and shows how ridiculous they would be in real life, it also has a happy fairy-tale ending and suggests that life would be better if people did live more by fairy tale ideals of kindness and trust. The only way that a relationship between Giselle and Robert can work is for her to become less of a fairy-tale true-believer (and give up the perfect prince) and him to become more of one (allow himself to love someone again).
Feast , a survival horror film starts as an obvious parody of such films, wherein the characters are simply named after their archetypes. However, despite the occasional sex joke, it creates some truly frightening monsters and horrific death scenes. By the end of the movie, no-one's laughing.
Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives was part self-parody, part serious slasher.
The Get Smart remake movie was criticised by some reviewers for attempting to both parody spy action movies whilst at the same time attempting to be a straight spy action movie.
That happens to most spy movies aimed at children and teenagers. Spy Kids, Agent Cody Banks, Stormbreaker, Los Superagentes and even Cats and Dogs suffered from it.
But that's what the whole Get Smart franchise was about.
Interesting case, the movie originally was going to be a straight action movie staring Mel Gibson, then the part was recast as Eddie Murphy so they took out a lot of the dialogue and just let Murphy improvise stuff.
Seth Rogen's version of The Green Hornet seems a parody of the comic book heroes that the Green Hornet actually predates. However, parodies by their very purpose exaggerate the outlandish elements of the target. To take the Batman, one finds it outlandish that a man would dress up as a bat and even more outlandish that he would drive around in a huge car with wings on it that would look screamingly outlandish traveling to and from a crime scene. Now look at the Green Hornet who wears a rain coat with a hat (just as numerous undercover law enforcement officials do), and drives around in an ordinary looking Imperial Chrysler. Kind of odd for a parody to jettison the ridiculous elements of its source, making this an indecisive parody.
Gremlins The first film didn't seem to know if it was supposed to be a parody of monster films or just a particularly weird monster film itself. While it had the highly goofy scenes with the gremlins themselves, it otherwise portrayed them as a very real threat. Action sequences were a bit hard to pin down. For example, is the violent kitchen fight supposed to be just a simple horror action sequence or a parody of it? The sequel was a more clear cut case of being a spoof.
Lake Placid took a lot of heat from critics who didn't realize it was supposed to be funny. As though a Cluster F-Bomb from Betty White could be anything else.
Lesbian Vampire Killers At times seems to be parodying the ridiculous oversexualisation of female vampires and vampire clichés, it also has long scenes of gratuitous nudity and a massive phallic sword MacGuffin.
Mystery Men cannot decide whether it is a ruthless Deconstruction of the Super Hero genre, or an Affectionate Parody. At first, the "heroes" are made to look like some deluded loons in a world without superpowers... until an old mentor and a new member with actual superpowers appear, and then the bunch of losers finally save the day against all odds.
Never Say Never Again The "unofficial" James Bond film can't quite seem to decide if it's a harsh satire of the Eon series or if it's a regular James Bond film. Plainly satirical scenes (such as Bond's discussion with M at the beginning) are side by side with normal Bond-style scenes.
Pineapple Express starts out as mushing a stoner movie into an action movie, showing how poorly this type of thing would go in real life. But then Seth Rogen takes an offscreen level in badass, and is jumping ontop of people and shooting everything.
The Princess Bride is this trope done more or less to artistic perfection.
More obviously a parody in the book (if only because of Goldman's "analyses" of "S. Morgenstern's" work. See the whole idea is Goldman is pretending it's someone else's... it's a weird setup). Would you believe it ends with a Bolivian Army Ending?
Shoot 'Em Up is arguably at least partly a metahumor-touched Affectionate Parody of the more over-the-top entries in the genre from which it takes its name (for goodness sake, the eagle-eyed hero's even a carrot-chomper!), and thus includes ridiculously over-the-top gunplay action and ridiculously over-the-top scenes involving sex and/or nudity on top of that. It's pretty entertaining... if you noticed the parody elements for what they were, which a hell of a lot of people (including a good two-thirds of the people this troper went to see the film with) apparently didn't, thus leading quite quickly to the film being dismissed as "another dumb, pointless action movie with unrealistic plot and characters" instead of being recognized as the fourth-wall-flirting action-comedy it really is at heart.
The fact that Paul Giamatti is in an action movie at all should have been something of a clue.
There's a scene were he shoots up an entire room full of bad guys WHILE having sex, and another were he shoots out the umbilical cord of a newborn baby. People took this movie seriously?
Spice World can't seem to decide if it's a self-spoof, a harsh satire of the Spice Girls themselves, or just a vapid ripoff of A Hard Day's Night.
Starship Troopers: Your enjoyment of the film version may depend on whether you think it's a parody. The movie started simply as a movie about a war with alien bugs until someone pointed out vague similarities with the book, and meddlesome executives insisted they buy the rights to the name to avoid a lawsuit. The director claimed that he found the book too slow and depressing to get through, so he decided to make the whole thing a Stealth Parody of fascist propaganda, which he felt the book was leaning towards.
From the author - nah, they would have broken up in about six months. But I didn't have time to write a book that long.
Snow Crash is an Indecisive Parody of Cyberpunk. In places it feels like a checklist of all the cyberpunk tropes ramped Up to Eleven: instead of the Mega Corp being as powerful as governments, corporations literally replace governments. The Hero Protagonist is named Hiro Protagonist, and is both the world's greatest hacker and the world's greatest katana-duelist. Raven is the epitome of badass, complete with a whole passage explaining in detail why he is the world's greatest badass. There are infodumps about various subjects, from toilet paper to Sumerian mythology, thrown in at random. From the mock-epic first chapter to the insane climax, it oozes Rule Of Cool. It's considered a landmark work of Cyberpunk, a parody of Cyberpunk, and a herald of Post Cyberpunk.
Live Action TV
Desperate Housewives When it premiered, it straddled the line between parody & nighttime soap before landing on the side of soap (albeit with a good dose of comedy).
Glee seems to be sliding in here. Is it a quirky teen drama with dark comedy elements and Crowning Music of Awesome? Or is it a dark comedy parodying teen dramas with intentional Soundtrack Dissonance? Nobody seems to really know.
Power Rangers RPM In a definite case of Tropes Are Not Bad, it manages to be one of the most depressing parodies of Power Rangers ever. The show constantly varies between lampshading PR tropes ("Sometimes when I morph, a giant fireball appears behind me for no apparent reason..."), and dark storylines (Dr. K's past). Of course, for some, Your Mileage May Vary.
The 7pm Project Part of the reason it's struggling in the ratings is because of this. Is the show a news satire, a news parody which looks at amusing stories, or an ordinary news show that happens to be hosted by comedians?
She Spies Nobody seemed to get that it was an action-comedy series bordering on parody, mainly because to the untrained eye, it looked like just another trashy syndicated action show. Which is probably why it got retooled into a straight action show for its second (and last) season.
Dethklok, the DefictionalizedDeath Metal band from Metalocalypse, border on this. While certainly satirical, the virtual band's music is actually quite good, with drums from the Metal veteran Gene Hoglan from The Devin Townsend Project.
Noting, of course, that most of the reviews vary from lukewarm to positive, with ratings of around 60-90%, and that of the few bad reviews, one is titled "I hate this and anyone who likes it is a scumbag", which betrays just the slightest twinge of bias.
Also, while it would be entirely possible to either interpret the over-the-top guitar solos as straight over-the-top guitar solos or parodies of over-the-top guitar solos, the lyrics are fairly unambiguously parodic.
Religious(?) example: The Church of the SubGenius. One Church text openly taunts the reader with this: "A joke disguised as a religion? Or an actual, secretive religion, disguised as a joke disguised as a religion? Or an incredibly complex joke, disguised as an extremely ambiguous religion, disguised as a joke disguised as a religion?"
Discordianism. In this case it's largely the point.
At least one of the above has been described such that "If you don't see the joke, you've missed the point. But if you think it's nothing at all except a joke... you've also missed the point."
Tabletop Games
The creators of FATAL have variously claimed it to be a work of "historically and mythically accurate scholarship" and "controversial humour".
Theater
Arguably, A Midsummer Night's Dream. Particularly the scenes with the Mechanicals, who are performing a self parody of Romeo and Juliet, it's possible those characters are parodies of some of the Lord Chamberlain's Men
The Broadway version of Tanz Der Vampire, retitled Dance of the Vampires. Tanz is a serious rock musical, albeit not without humor. Dance tried to make the show into a straight-up musical comedy, since the producer thought this would go over better with an American audience. Unfortunately, due to an incredibly dysfunctional creative process, many of the songs didn't fit in with the new approach, so the show wound up swinging between Camp and seriousness, leaving no one satisfied. To quote the Variety review: "It's not an outright comedy [...] but as a serious musical — well, it's pretty damn funny."
The play Done To Death is an Affectionate Parody of the Mystery Fiction genre. However it combines drastically different styles and the first scene of Act 1 is extremely different from the rest of the show.
Video Games
High Voltage Software claimed that Conduit 2 is supposed to be "tongue-in-cheek". Some portions the game are clearly taking the piss (half of Ford's dialogue, for instance), but other parts of the game are done completely seriously (like the conspiracy objects), and still others are ambiguous (the ending).
Though the final message seems to support the parody claim.
Web Original
A Very Potter Musical and its sequel run on Rule of Funny—until they get to a particularly serious moment from the books and play it up as heartwrenchingly as possible before settling back into nonsense again.
Western Animation
The Total Drama Island series started out as an animated parody of reality shows. The focus on shipping and other such plot tumors have essentially made it a totally pre-scripted (read: slightly more scripted than usual) reality show that happens to be animated.
