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's making jokes already made. 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.
Compare Indecisive Deconstruction. Also compare Denied Parody, where a work that is seen as a parody is denied to be such through Word Of God.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
Black Lagoon. it's hard to tell, at times, 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.
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. 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.
Anf then there's Magical Project S which starts off as a clear parody of Sailor Moon...and ALSO seems to drop it mid way.
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.
One episode of Zettai Karen Children is essentially a parody of Yuri Genre shows, but the only parts that are actually a parody are that Kaoru and Sakaki are lampshading everything and that it's all actually an undercover mission on Naomi's part. However, just about every visual element associated with the genre is used completely straight, along with other tropes such as one-sided Bait-and-Switch Lesbians, with the teacher actually being attracted to Naomi.
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.
Death to Smoochy seemed to have trouble deciding whether it wanted to be a full-on black comedy about an embittered former kids'-show host (played by Robin Williams) seeking revenge against his replacement, an insipid purple dinosaur named "Smoochy", or a wacky and only-kinda-dark-humored parody of kidvid shows in general. Then it veered off into a heartwarming ending where Smoochy (or the puppeteer behind him, anyway) and the embittered kidvid host reconciled their differences, and the whole thing became not just an indecisive parody, but an indecisive mess in general.
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.
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. The original was like this as well, though not quite as blatant about it.
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.
The idea is that the target demographic can take it as 'straight' while the parents/older siblings can see it as a parody.
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.
The reason for this is because first Gremlins was intended to be a straightforward horror flick until Joe Dante decided to go Lighter and Softer in his approach, while still using the same script. For instance, when they find Barney strung up with Christmas lights in the film? He was supposed to be eviscerated. And the part where Billy's Mom is attacked by Gremlins? Billy was going to come home and see her head rolling down the staircase. And cute, cuddly little Gizmo? He was going to turn into a Gremlin halfway through.
Hot Fuzz lampoons a lot of the typical action cliches, but as it continues on really starts forgetting if it's supposed to be a comedy or not and plays most of the later scenes for drama rather than laughs.
House of the Wolfman can't seem to decide whether if it wants to be a spoof of old Monster Mash films or a Retraux horror film.
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.
The film version of Leave It To Beaver placed the wholesome fifties family in the nineties like the film version of The Brady Bunch that came out around the same time. However, unlike the other film which was a straight up parody, Leave It To Beaver didn't go very far with it and ended up being an odd mix of parody and a plain old remake.
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 on top 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.
The Slumber Party Massacre does it unintentionally, where a script feminist parody of the slasher genre was filmed completely straight by a director who didn't realize it as such. The effect is surreal.
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. Indeed, one of the main criticisms of the is that it both wants to be a goofy hyper-skewed version of high school, while at the same time wanting to "really speak to the kids" and seriously "be a voice to the voiceless", something that smacks of eating one's cake and having it too.
Ryan Murphy's previous high school show Popular was worse. One minute the show would be an over-the-top parody of high school shows complete with on-screen graphics and pop culture references and then the next it would be a serious drama about cancer, eating disorders, and sex. The show hypocritically tried to condemn bullying while routinely making the bitchiest girls in school (Nicole and the fabulous Miss Mary Cherry!) the funniest and most entertaining parts of the show.
Ugly Betty could never really decide if it was an affectionate send-up of soap operas and telenovelas or if was a dramedic example of one.
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).
The 7pm Project. 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?
Nobody seemed to get that She Spies 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.
The Muppet Show always walked the line between being a full-blown parody of Variety Shows and a unique example of one itself.
Many people may forget that Buffy the Vampire Slayer originally started as a parody of most typical horror cliches (especially Buffy in the Final Girl role) before undergoing Cerebus Syndrome in the later seasons.
Other than the pilot, the first few episodes of The Middleman weren't very clear on whether their intention was to parody Disney Channel-style heroes or to join them. Halfway through the first season, though, it solidified on the side of parody.
Music
The Black Eyed Peas' "My Humps" is supposedly a parody of misogynistic mainstream rap.
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.
Jethro Tull's 1972 effort Thick as a Brick was intended to be a parody of Progressive Rock, in response to Ian Anderson's discontent of their previous album consistently being called a Concept Album. Of course, today the album is deemed one of the essential classics of the genre. So, depending on how you look at it, they either did it right or terribly, terribly wrong. A sequel came out 40 years later in 2012.
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?"
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.
TV Tropes Wiki
The Real Life tropes page can't seem to decide whether to pretend that reality is a TV show, an MMORPG, or a Tabletop RPG, or whether to just play the examples straight. As examples on said page can change drastically in style Depending on the Writer, there may never be a unified vision for that page.
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.
It's not always immediately clear whether Iron Brigade is supposed to be Rated M for Manly or Testosterone Poisoning. Some aspects seem to be firmly mocking over-the-top manliness, while others seem to be playing it straight. The Word Of God isn't very helpful either — when citing over-the-top men's magazines like Man's Life as a source, they both refer to how warped their values are, and how awesome they were.
Borderlands was a bit unsure as to whether it wanted to be a parody; on the one hand, you've got screaming midgets and bandits yelling about how you killed their friends before they got a chance to. On the other hand, the final boss is a straight-up Sealed Evil in a Can, and the Precursors sideplot is also completely straight. By the time the DLC's came out, they had made their decision—parody all the way. General Knoxx spends most of his DLC calling you up to complain about his boss, who is five, and warn you that he sent assassins after you.
Knoxx: Oh, by the way, I sent Omega Squad to kill you. Love!
The Fist game had this justified, before the Art change the game was supposed to be a much more serious shooter compared to what the final product became. However while the overall tone changed, certain plot points were left unchanged.
The second game is also a shameless parody. More midgets, more nonsensical enemy banter, and a Big Bad who calls you up to gloat about how awesome he is. Such as the time he got a pony made out of diamonds, which he named Butt Stallion.
Handsome Jack: It's not a statue or anything, it's an actual living pony—you know, I'll just show you. Butt Stallion! Get over here! Say hello!
(whinny)
Handsome Jack: Butt Stallion says hello.
Although the sidequests and enemies stay largely hilarious throughout the game, the main quest of Borderlands 2 gets dark near the end. There's the fight against Bloodwing, the fight against Angel, the abrupt murder of Roland and kidnapping of Lilith, and a bit of torture that isn't Played for Laughs (there's lots of torture, just only a little bit that isn't funny).
Far Cry 3 was supposed to be a satire/deconstruction of typical video game power fantasies, but spent so much time playing them straight (and doing a very good job of it) that it's hard to actually parse out the intended satire. The lead writer, Jeffrey Yohalem, wound up on the interview circuit trying to explain to people what the story really meant.
Admitted by Andrew Hussie on his now defunct Formspring:
It makes one wonder, what does "going grimdark" even mean? Is that even a thing? I guess it is, as long as we understand that it probably refers to the metamorphosis of a vanilla character into a brooding gothic cliche, and this is something played absolutely straight in things which are generally terrible. Please note it is not being played straight in this case. [AND YET IT IS. WINK.]
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.
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.
