History Main / ParodyFailure

[[redirect:NominalParody]]

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Parody, by definition, must exaggerate. Yet some attempts at parody fail at this basic task. The spoof writer aims for clever jokes or commentary but instead directly duplicates the original work, resulting in Parody Failure.

This usually stems from ignorance of the source material. The writer underestimates the original's capacity for incongruous situations, characterization or dialogue, falsely thinking such elements will necessarily parody the source. Parody Failure also results from misunderstanding how works play with their own tropes. Works that deconstruct themselves or play their tropes for laughs render some parodies redundant.

The jokes in a Parody Failure may succeed on their own - they may have succeeded on their own in the original work - but they fail as a critique on or response to the original. Viewers may also simply enjoy a Parody Failure by interpreting it as a ShoutOut rather than a parody.

Contrast with ShallowParody, when source material ignorance produces a parody that departs too ''much'' from the original.

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!!Examples

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[[folder:Anime & Manga]]
* In Spain, saying you're "turning black" means [[ThatMakesMeFeelAngry you're getting angry]], much like a video game boss TurnsRed, [[CaptainObvious but black]]. A ''Manga/DragonBall'' parody comic had Mr. Popo (Who is black) say he was "turning black" as a joke... except he actually says that on the Spanish anime dub at one point.
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[[folder:Comic Books]]
* Early in Marvel Comics' parody ''What Th--?!'' series, writer-artist John Byrne penned a story in which {{Superman}} and the FantasticFour meet. After the Thing shows up, Byrne adds a footnote saying, "I'm sorry, it's impossible to write parody Thing dialogue that doesn't sound like the real thing."
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[[folder:Fan Works]]
* At the height of [[HarryPotter Pottermania]] were many lame "parodies" that involved... get this!... Harry Potter entering puberty and being a very unpleasant teenager! Who wants to read a book about that? Apparently they were expecting the later entries to continue the "kid in a candy store" sense of wonder from the first book instead of maturing along with the target audience.
** When EmmaWatson appeared on ''The Wayne Brady Show'' to promote the second film, Brady asked Watson if they were making the films quickly, saying "you can't have" it be "Hello, I'm Harry Potter and this is my chamber of puberty."
** Surprisingly, this is one of the things the ''WesternAnimation/TheGrimAdventuresOfBillyAndMandy'' parodies got right. In the second episode, their Harry Potter stand-in has become a teen... but the joke is that Billy and Mandy (who are standard WesternAnimation children who never grow up except as a PlotRelevantAgeUp for a FlashForward) are bewildered by the concept of aging.
* There are often Manga/{{Naruto}} parodies where other, better ninjas will mock Naruto for all of his negative traits, such as his [[HighlyVisibleNinja lack of stealth]], [[BrattyHalfPint annoying attitude]], and [[ThemeDeck small movepool]]. Name a single Naruto character that DOESN'T do one of these and they're from [[CharacterDevelopment Shippuden]].
* ''Fanfic/EigaSentaiScanranger'' had an episode where the characters spoof various superspies. Including AustinPowers. The villain of the piece (a pseudo Blofeld named, get this, Blofish) is even referred to as a "monocle-wearing Dr. Evil." It also doesn't help that the writer's idea of parodying these movies was having his poor man's Bond take off his tuxedo to reveal a wetsuit underneath instead of the other way around, and his poor man's [[TombRaider Lara Croft]] use .44's instead of .45's.
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[[folder:Film]]
* ''Film/EpicMovie'' decided to parody ''{{Film/X-Men}}'' by having Wolverine bend his claws to look like he was flipping the bird, even though [[http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=af08 this same joke was used at one point in the original movie.]]
* ''[[SeltzerAndFriedberg Disaster Movie]]'' has a kid using foul language toward ''{{Hancock}}'', at which point Hancock slaps him. Not exactly an amusing gag to begin with, but particularly not amusing since something even more hilarious actually happens to such a kid in the real movie. Even worse, [[ShallowParody this actually appeared in some of the trailers]].
* SeltzerAndFriedberg continue this in ''Film/VampiresSuck''. The trailer contains a joke where the Jacob ripoff character says his contract states he must be shirtless every 10 minutes. This might be amusing until you consider that his constant shirtlessness was already [[LampshadeHanging lampshaded]] by the ''Literature/{{Twilight}}'' movies already.
* SeltzerAndFriedberg give us a tag-teaming TropeCodifier, as [[WebVideo/BadMovieBeatdown Film Brain]] (of Website/ThatGuyWithTheGlasses) and Korey Coleman of Spill.com have pointed out that ALL of their films consist of nothing but allusions to summer/winter blockbusters that came out around each parody's respective release date, with hardly any actual "jokes" made at their expense (not to mention that some of these films, like ''NachoLibre'' or ''Borat'' are already "spoofs" of some sort and hardly merit anyway).
* ''SlumberPartyMassacre'' was intended as satirical jab at the slasher genre for it's victimization of women, and excessive nudity. However, the directors filmed it as a straight example of the genre. As a result it was known for having more gore and nudity than any other slasher up to that point. The sequels corrected this, but it became more of a general parody of slashers, than a parody of any particular element.
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[[folder:Gamebooks]]
* ''[[http://www.kibo.com/kibofic/spot_xmas_3.html Spot's Third First Christmas]]'', according to author {{Kibo}}, was "a parody of those crappy '[[ChooseYourOwnAdventure Choose Your Adventure]]' books" with many bad endings and only one happy ending which is unreachable from any path. One actual book in the CYOA series, "Inside UFO 54-40," the best ending was deliberately unreachable (and not unreachable by oversight, as it was in plenty of others).
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[[folder:Literature]]
* We've all heard the IncrediblyLamePun about playing [[Literature/TheStrangeCaseOfDrJekyllAndMrHyde "Mr. Hyde and Mr. Seek" or "Mr. Hyde-And-Seek"]], right? That joke, in fact, was made in the original book.
-->'''Gabriel Utterson''': If he be Mr. Hyde, I shall be Mr. Seek.
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[[folder:Live Action TV]]
* One of the very last BobHope specials on NBC tried to lampoon [[Film/{{Batman}} the 1989]] ''[[Film/{{Batman}} Batman]]'' [[Film/{{Batman}} movie]], and had Hope done up as Jack Nicholson's Joker. Both Batman and Superman were in the skit, and Hope refers to them by derisive names like "Bat-Brain" and "Super-Stupe", and getting laughs from his equally aging studio audience. Hope and his writers must have thought that villains do not talk like that to heroes, but especially since Denny O'Neil, this is almost exactly the way the Joker talks down to opponents.
* In 1995 ''Series/SaturdayNightLive'' did a CirqueDuSoleil spoof -- ''{{Alegria}}'' was in New York at the time -- in which the highlight was a male performer presenting a female performer a bottle of wine, which was treated by the emcee as an amazing and whimsical feat. The skit suffers if you've seen the non-touring Las Vegas production ''Mystere'' (which opened in 1993), in which a clown presents a woman with champagne as part of an elaborate ''comic'' setpiece. And since nothing besides some costume details ''was'' specific to ''{{Alegria}}'', this overlaps with ShallowParody. Cirque parodies in general seem to ignore the fact that the shows are often extremely funny and not simply two hours of posing and pretentiousness.
** ''Saturday Night Live'' has a long history of lengthy skits centered on some irritating everyday person, group, or behavior, but that don't add enough of a twist to do more than replicate their irritating qualities.
* ''The Chronicle'' was a SciFiChannel TV show that attempted to parody the tabloids, by stating that everything in them was true. The first episode parodied (or ripped off) the plot of the first ''Film/MenInBlack'' film. Thing is, ''Men In Black'' was already a parody/comedy, so there was very little that could be made fun of -- and it had already used the joke of the tabloids being true.
* A particular problem with British comedy shows in TheEighties was impressionists "doing" people like "Dame Edna Everage", "[[SomeMothersDoAveEm Frank Spencer]]" and "[[ThePinkPanther Inspector Clouseau]]", completely ignoring the fact that these were already comedy caricatures created by Barry Humphries, Michael Crawford and PeterSellers respectively, leaving absolutely nothing left to parody.
** ''TheOffice'' 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 ''LaverneAndShirley'', because they couldn't come up with any situation that was more ridiculous than what the show already did.
* Inverted by the famous SNL skit about Sarah Palin during the 2008 U.S. presidential race. The skit very intentionally consisted almost entirely of actual Palin lines from her interview with Katie Couric. A couple of judicious additions and [[TinaFey Tina Fey's]] delivery were all it took.
* The ''MysteryScienceTheater3000'' guide book records the following story. While watching the film ''The Human Duplicators'' repeatedly and collecting jokes to work into the final script, one of the writers piped up with, "It looks like a state park" while the screen was panning through terrain that... looked like a state park. Realizing that this was less a joke than just an accurate observation, they didn't actually use it in the final script, but subsequently referred to similar instances as "State park jokes". Others could learn this lesson.
* 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.
** ''SNL'' managed to avoid this by having the bunny interrupt a serious PublicServiceAnnouncement on drunk driving in one cold open. In another episode it interrupted Weekend Update but promptly tumbled from the desk into a vat of acid...and when Dennis Miller tried to pick up where he'd left off, Annoying Man (a Jon Lovitz recurring character) turned up in an Energizer Bunny costume to make matters worse, if only briefly.
* ''{{Victorious}}'' "parodied" ''TheBreakfastClub'' by doing nothing more than ripping off lines almost verbatim except to replace the naughty words with their own pretend naughty words and/or words that are just another type of sexual innuendo. Example, the discussion about virginity becomes a discussion about being tacos and eating meat.
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[[folder:Music]]
* There's a parody out there of "The Blue Tail Fly" in which the chorus is changed to "Jimmy drinks corn, and I don't care", meaning that Jimmy is drinking corn whiskey. Apparently the would-be parodists were unaware that the most common interpretation of the lyric "Jimmy crack corn and I don't care" is that of "cracking corn", which is to say, ''making'' corn whiskey. They not only failed to parody it, they arguably watered it down a notch...
* There's a "response" to ''[[TheLonelyIsland The Lonely Island's]]'' "Jizz In My Pants" called [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJsQcnB6GC0 "Puke In My Mouth"]]. Those behind it fail to see the original was a parody, [[SelfDeprecation self-deprecating]] and ''actually funny''. The result is you get a bunch of attractive women acting like self important [[{{Jerkass}} assholes]] who spend the entire song mocking ''other'' people.
* Ke$ha, 3OH!3, and LMFAO have all made claims that their music is meant to be taken as parody but most average listeners can't tell the difference between their "parodies" and a Flo Rida song..
* ''LadyGaga''' is often said to be parodying the pop-music genre by making her performances and appearance increasingly over-the-top and controversial to the point of being ridiculous. In other words, she's parodying pop stars by [[Music/BritneySpears doing the same thing]] [[{{Madonna}} they've all been doing]] [[MichaelJackson for decades.]]
** The jury's out on whether she does this as an earnest parody or cash in on the same thing pop stars have doing for decades.
* Music/WeirdAlYankovic's song "Perform This Way," a take on Gaga's "Born This Way," ends up having the same messages as the original song - to wit, LadyGaga is a strange person, but that's okay.
** Now, in all fairness, they're talking about the same message in completely different contexts. Gaga refers to races and gender preferences and identities, which could be applied to almost anybody who's different. Weird Al, however, focuses on the woman herself, and hones in on her performance style. Same essential message, yes, but construed in different ways.
* The Youtube meme of taking isolated vocal tracks of classic songs and running them through Microsoft's Songsmith program has led to some hilarious musical juxtapositions ([[OzzyOsbourne "Crazy Train"]] as bluegrass, [[Music/{{Motorhead}} "Ace of Spades"]] as folk-pop). But the [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kxqMpGAL3I lounge jazz version of "Runnin' With The Devil"]] by VanHalen, while amusing, totally sounds like something David Lee Roth would've put on one of his solo albums.
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[[folder:Newspaper Comics]]
* There was a ''MotherGooseAndGrimm'' comic once of a man watching TV with a woman behind him looking shocked, and the caption, "Scully discovers the XXX Files." Which wasn't actually funny if you had any knowledge of ''{{The X-Files}}'', since it was well-established that Mulder really did [[PornStash stash porn]] all over the office, and that Scully was perfectly aware of it and didn't care. (Not that it would be all that funny anyway...)
** Another strip featured ''EdwardScissorHands'' playing Rock, Paper, Scissors with a little kid, and continually losing. This joke especially falls flat considering it was used in the movie as a running gag.
** [[http://www.cartoonistgroup.com/store/add.php?iid=535 And he did it again.]]
* Inverted and HilariousInHindsight in an OffTheMark comic making fun of TheSimpsons. Bart goes to a barber who is confused as to where his head ends and hairline begins. This joke was made on the show years later.
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[[folder:Print Media]]
* This was practically the specialty of ''Magazine/{{Cracked}}'' Magazine:
** Several ''MorkAndMindy'' parodies, apart from some BreakingTheFourthWall moments, could pass for real episodes. The corny dialogue was so dead on, some might wonder if the actual ''Mork and Mindy'' writers made them.
** In the late '70s, the people at ''Cracked'' seemed to figure out that ''featuring'' popular characters from, e.g., ''StarWars'' or ''HappyDays'' was more lucrative than just parodying the works themselves, and could be done for a much longer time. The Fonz was so heavily featured that he was practically a ''Cracked'' "house character" for several years. Indeed, ''Cracked'' never actually did a parody, per se, of the ''HappyDays'' show. Instead, the magazine simply feature the characters, ''frequently'', in other comedy bits.
** In later years, their ''WesternAnimation/SouthPark'' parody pretty much played it straight as well - nothing at all like ''Magazine/{{Mad}}'' and its constant LampshadeHanging, [[NoFourthWall fourth-wall demolition]] and hilarious DeusExMachina endings.
* ''Magazine/{{Mad}}'', in its 1950s ComicBook incarnation, sometimes ended up committing this trope. In their Disney parody, for example, much of the humor derived from DonaldDuck losing his clothes and getting captured by a duck farmer who could barely understand him. Pretty funny in itself, but Donald winding up naked and coming off as incomprehensible due to his quacking voice happened in quite a few ''actual'' Donald Duck cartoons.
** [[InvertedTrope Inverted]] and HilariousInHindsight with a {{Shrek}} scenes we'd like to see comic written when the first movie was released. It shows Donkey with dragon/donkey hybrid babies. This became a reality in the sequels.
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[[folder:Radio]]
* ''TheBobAndTomShow'' likes to cast its hosts and/or characters in wacky variants on recent hit movies, and fell victim to this when they cast white trash caricature Donnie Baker in "Funeral Crashers" -- apparently unaware that the concept of picking up women at a funeral had already been explored in the third act of ''WeddingCrashers''.
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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 Franchise/MetalGear parody in ''VideoGame/ApeEscape 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.
** On the other hand, the VideoGame/MetalGearSolid3 self-parody crossover with ''Ape Escape'' is spot-on, not least in having Snake complain about all the "FollowTheLeader" types who could be doing this mission, and parodying the ridiculously intricate relationships in ''Metal Gear''.
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[[folder:Webcomics]]
* [[http://chuckleaduck.com/comic/no-i-get-it/ This]] comic becomes significantly less funny if one realizes that beating other proto-humans over the head with the bone is actually what the proto-human was doing immediately before the iconic monolith scene in ''TwoThousandOne''.
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[[folder:Web Original]]
* [[http://www.cracked.com/article_17674_how-make-jokeless-comedy-studying-epic-movie-guys.html How to Make Jokeless Comedy: Studying the 'Epic Movie' Guys]].
* ''WebVideo/AvatarTheAbridgedSeries'' suffers from this some of the time, due to parodying a show that already has a high joke quotient. For example, its parody of the episode "The Storm" has a scene where Katara says: "Aang would never run away! [Aang gets on his glider and flies off] Aang, stop running away!" The original was exactly the same, only with different wording.
* Before he became TheIrateGamer, Chris Bores made a [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGZR9AnypvI "parody"]] of MythBusters. Though it's not as much a parody as it is a bland imitation.
* ''KeyOfAwesome'''s "I Need A Doctor" parody pokes fun at the HoYay between [[HeterosexualLifePartners Dr Dre and Eminem]] by having Eminem hit blatantly on Dre, Dre responding with a sarcastic and only mildly irritated rejection, and Eminem [[GayMoment desperately attempting to backpedal and pretend he didn't mean it to regain some shred of heterosexuality]]. Eminem used this ''exact same joke'' in the song and video "Lose It", where he hits on Dre at a bar, and when he gets shot down, claims he's blind. The song and video also had a HoYay-ridden hook that went "[[ArmoredClosetGay Yeah, boy, shake that thing - whoops, I mean girl. Girl girl girl]]" and a section where Eminem {{cosplay}}ed gay icon Madonna.
* The author of the comics and articles featured on PlatypusComix sometimes makes parodies that highlight some moronic things he found out the subject performed in real life. (eg, Some of the answers Far East Movement gives in [[http://www.platypuscomix.net/people/geesix.html this fake interview]] got lifted from [[http://music.yahoo.com/blogs/hip-hop-media-training/far-east-movement-explains-meaning-behind-like-a-g6.html a real article]], although the author also included some fabricated responses.)
* In WebVideo/TheNostalgiaCritic's Top 11 Drug PSA's, he makes a joke about a Star Wars smoking one about robots not having lungs to damage...which C-3PO himself comments in the PSA.
** Referenced in his ASimpleWish review when he yells at the character with a magic wand, "stop turning my jokes into something that already exist."
* Referenced in WebVideo/TheNostalgiaChick's CharliesAngels review, she says dressing sexy to parody the Angels has no point.
* ''WebAnimation/HowItShouldHaveEnded's'' video for ''TheTexasChainsawMassacre2003'' remake had Erin beat Leatherface by just kicking him in the balls. She did kick him in the balls in the actual film (in the meat freezer scene) and it barely slowed him down.
** In addition, their video for ''HarryPotterandtheDeathlyHallowsFilms'' attempted to point out a PlotHole by having [[spoiler: Professor Snape]] use a Time Turner to go back and kill Voldemort. The problem is that Time Turners don't work that way in the Harry Potter universe.
* This often happens in snarky blogs. For example, the review Jesus Beezus (a blog of the ''RamonaQuimby'' books) does of Ramona and her Mother has this line:
-->"Mr. and Mrs. Quimby get into a sniping contest about whose grandmother was better. Yeah, really, that's what they fight about. Lame."
** However, the Quimbys acknowledge later how ridiculous their fight was and Mrs. Quimby even jokes to her daughters:
-->"We want you to be perfect so you won't grow up to bicker about your grandmothers and their pancakes."
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Western Animation]]
* ''WesternAnimation/RobotChicken'' and ''The TV Land Awards'' have both featured skits that combine ''{{Sex and the City}}'' with ''TheGoldenGirls'', or at least were aimed in that direction. Problem is, 70% of the humor in ''The Golden Girls'' derives from these aging women unashamedly talking about their sex lives.
* The old cartoon ''{{Batfink}}'' is basically a spoof of... the silly [[Series/{{Batman}} Adam West Batman]] show. Which was a spoof of superheroes to begin with.
* ''WesternAnimation/SouthPark'' actually had a rare deliberate usage of this trope on their parody of ''WesternAnimation/FamilyGuy''. While it may have been exaggerated, not every line on ''Family Guy'' is a setup for a cutaway gag after all, the cutaway gags themselves weren't too different from what one would typically see on ''Family Guy''.
* This trope is referenced and parodied on ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'' episode where they make Comic Book Guy's comic book into a movie. One of the Hollywood producers talks about how they worked on Bad Summer Movie, which was supposed to be a parody of bad summer movies and turned out to be one itself.
* ''MarvelMashUp'' adds further support to John Byrne's statement (see Comic Books, above) that it's impossible to write parody dialogue for Ben Grimm that doesn't sound like something he might actually say.
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* In WebVideo/TheNostalgiaChick's CharliesAngels review, she says dressing sexy to parody the Angels has no point.

** [InvertedTrope Inverted]] and HilariousInHindsight with a {{Shrek}} scenes we'd like to see comic written when the first movie was released. It shows Donkey with dragon/donkey hybrid babies. This became a reality in the sequels.

** [Inverted InvertedTrope]] and HilariousInHindsight with a {{Shrek}} scenes we'd like to see comic written when the first movie was released. It shows Donkey with dragon/donkey hybrid babies. This became a reality in the sequels.

** [InvertedTrope Inverted]] and HilariousInHindsight with a {{Shrek}} scenes we'd like to see comic written when the first movie was released. It shows Donkey with dragon/donkey hybrid babies. This became a reality in the sequels.