Lesson learned: Don't sleep with your Literature professor.
"I contend that making a film that's only part satire is hedging your bet, in a sense saying 'if you like it and think it's good, then it's a good movie. If you think it stinks, then I meant it to be funny.' It's the coward's way to make a movie."
— Mike Nelson's Movie Megacheese in reference to Wild Things
Inverted by 50s German comic strip Nick Knatterton. Author Manfred Schmidt wanted write an over-the-top parody of American comic books, so he created a ridiculous mass of speech, thought and smell bubbles and little boxes referring to other little boxes. It was intended as a one-shot gag, but because no one in the country knew all that much about comic books at the time, readers took it more or less seriously and created a smash hit. Schmidt was then forced to continue the strip for years as a more-or-less straight super-detective yarn.
Film
Deafula was said to be a parody, and was even renamed Young Deafula in some places. The reason for the conspicuous lack of jokes? Only deaf people will get it, said the director.
Independence Day. Roland Emmerich repeatedly claimed that it was supposed to be comical all along. It's a rare example of a film that was very successful when appreciated straight.
It also could be a bit of a boarderline example, with humor and shout outs (Brent Spiner/AKA Data as a scientist, flying saucers, Area 51, etc.), and humor, but not a complete parody. Basically, it could be an action-comedy, where the comedy is part parody.
The Happening. M. Night Shyamalan attempted to downplay its critical curb-stomping by claiming he intended it as a parody of bad B movies. No one believed him.
Mommie Dearest started being advertised as a parody a few months after its release.
The Concorde...Airport '79 also was re-marketed as a comedy after critics pointed out all of its unintentionally hilarious moments. Still didn't help it at the box office, though
Monster A-Go Go Completing the snarky puppet trifecta, Herschel Gordon Lewis claimed it was a parody of some sort, although what exactly it's a parody of is unknown.
The Room. The most famous example is probably the backpedaling done by Tommy Wiseau (director, writer, and star) after his So Bad, It's Good melodrama was released and critically panned. Taking a page from Showgirls, he decided to pull a Sure, Why Not? when people asked him if this was supposed to be taken seriously and say it was a black comedy all along. It even says so on the DVD case. Most fans of the movie still don't believe him. It doesn't help his case that, even as he uses the "Black Comedy" label, he still describes the content of the film in melodramatic, passionate terms.
Space Mutiny: Legendary (thanks to Mystery Science Theater 3000) the sci-fi stinker's lead actress claimed that the whole thing was in fact a spoof of the genre, which might at least explain the cheesy sets and costumes, as well as the bizarre "ancient dentistry" scene. Although that doesn't explain why, of the three directors that worked on the film, one wanted his name removed, another has his buried deep in the credits, and the third isn't listed at all.
Stephen King claimed that his So Bad, It's Good film Maximum Overdrive (which he wrote and directed) was a deliberate homage to bad movies such as Plan 9 from Outer Space after it received bad reviews. Apparently he was hoping that the audiences had forgotten the trailers in which the film was clearly marketed as a horror film, with King himself promising the audience, "I will scare the hell out of you." However, he later acknowledged on more than one occasion that the film sucked, calling it a "moron movie."
Claudio Fragasso tried pulling this off with Troll 2 after the documentary about it, Best Worst Movie, came out.
There's Nothing Out There. On the DVD commentary track the filmmakers lampshade their own jocular use of this trope endlessly, chuckling that everything they didn't intend and which didn't work was part of the parody whereas everything else wasn't. (It should be noted that there is no doubt as to whether the film on the whole was a parody.)
When Uwe Boll publicly trashed Michael Bay and Eli Roth in a number of interviews, both responded rather loudly and publicly, giving Boll high-profile attention. Boll later claimed this was an engineered publicity stunt to promote Postal. If so, it was probably the only Crowning Moment of Awesome in his career. Except it didn't work, because much like the games it was based on, Postal tanked at the box office.
Wild Things is generally seen as a Guilty Pleasure if nothing else, but the sheer volume of unintentional hilarity has lead some to hypothesize that it may have been a Stealth Parody of erotic thrillers all along. It was directed by an indie filmmaker with a history of making clever movies, and it gives a juicy (and funny) supporting role to a well-known comedian (Bill Murray), so the hypothesis isn't unreasonable.
The Wicker Man remake by Neil Labute was widely panned. Nicolas Cage said, "You don’t karate chop Leelee Sobieski in the throat and not know how absurd that is, but it’s just not something I would like to talk about. I would rather let them discover it on their own, but I think I learned a lot of that kind of off the wall kind of stuff watching Stanley Kubrick, because his movies were incredibly funny, but you never really knew how much was planned or accident you know?"
Literature
Battlefield Earth: L. Ron Hubbard's publishers responded to criticism of the novel by claiming that it was meant to be satirical. Riiiight.
Valerie Solanas wrote The SCUM Manifesto, which among other things calls for "the eradication of men". Ten years later, she claimed it was satirical when she became famous for trying to kill Andy Warhol. No word on whether that assassination attempt was "satirical", however.
Live Action TV
After clips of Jamie Kennedy's disastrous (technical glitches, uncensored profanity, has-been musical guests, etc.) local Los Angeles New Year's Eve live countdown special First Night 2013 went viral, he quickly (and unsurprisingly) invoked this trope.
Before the main series of Derek aired, Ricky Gervais spoke repeatedly about how he had "dropped the veil of irony" and had made a sincere comedy/drama. After being tweeted with complaints about the frequent use of narmy montages accompanied by melancholy music , he responded that it was intentional and that they were there to give the versimilitude of a cloying documentary. This was despite earlier retweeting comments earnestly praising the sequences for their emotional power.
Music
Beastie Boys. These guys like to pretend that their first album, "Licensed to Ill", was a parody of Rap and frat boy attitudes... despite the fact that the album seems to be a straight example of these attitudes as opposed to a send-up or even a subtle parody.
Plus,if you have seen the video album they made it makes it even more painfully clear.
Alanis Morissette. Isn't it ironic, don't ya think, that when she wrote a song about irony, and everyone pointed out that all her examples of irony were not technically irony, she suddenly decided that that was, in fact, the irony all along.
Bob Dylan's 1970 album Self Portrait (mainly made up of sloppily-performed cover versions) received the first mostly (and often viciously) negative reviews of his career. In the first few years after its release he defended the album, but since then he's claimed that it was a deliberate attempt to alienate his more obsessed fans. Dylan also made the same claim about his previous album, Nashville Skyline, a country-flavored album where Dylan trades in his nasal sneer for a singing voice that borders on crooning. Ultimately, both albums were Top Ten LPs, and Nashville Skyline even kept The Who's Tommy out of the #1 spot in the UK. Nashville Skyline at least has since been Vindicated by History.
Canibus. This has been said about the rapper's disastrous third album, C: Tru Hollywood Stories, after its terrible reception.
Peter Gabriel is fond of using this to explain his early lyrics, especially the ones from the Genesis days.
Lou Reed of Velvet Underground. Depending on which day of the week you ask him, his album Metal Machine Music (a double album of nothing but multitracked feedback noise) is either a Take That to his record company, a parody of Serious Music (John Cale in particular), a drug-fuelled mistake, or actual Serious Music.
REM's "Shiny Happy People" was either a legitimately happy song that the band has tried to retcon into being a parody of Chinese Propaganda, or a parody of Chinese propaganda that came off as being a legitimately happy song. Either way, the band hates it and arenot willing to discuss it.
This is what seems to be evolving around Sergei Prokofiev, whose cantatas lavishing praises upon Stalin have, in recent years, suddenly been determined by some critics to have really been mocking Stalin all along. Somewhat ironic, as, in earlier decades, his political works presented problems for his popularity in the West, with Prokofiev being dismissed as a Soviet propagandist.
Averted by Selena Gomez, who said that the name of her band The Scene was a pisstake before they released a note of music.
Far Cry 3 lead writer Jeffrey Yohalem responded to criticism of the game's thoroughly straight use of Mighty Whitey by announcing the plot was a satire. No one believed him.
Sonichu displays this trope for a different reason: The author wanted to avoid using copyrighted characters, so he made his own by combiningSonic the Hedgehog with a Pikachu. However when he was told later that this was still infringing copyright, he began to claim it was a parody so it could fall under Fair Use.
An in-universe example is found in The Order of the Stick. Zz'dtri the Drow Wizard was initially defeated after Vaarsuvius points out that he's a ripoff of Drizzt Do'urden and got dragged off by lawyers. However he returns much later in the story, stating that he got off by declaring himself a parody of Drizzt and returned to working for Nale long ago.
Web Original
Internet trolls. Some claim that their antics were "just an experiment." This is so common, that the phrase "Social Experiment" has become both a meme and a trope of its own among the denizens of Fandom Wank.
Some people who end up receiving an Internet Backdraft claim they were trolling all along. Not only is nobody fooled, this is basically trying to avoid being called an asshole by admitting that they're a different (possibly worse) kind of asshole.
LPers that receive the Retsupurae treatment tend to end up evoking this trope. With a few exceptions aside, it's mostly to save face.
Succinctly described in the originator◊ of the "troll face" meme.
A YouTubevideo game reviewer under the title "G**e D**e" (censored due to his paranoia) made a bunch of poorly-made reviews that amounted to "whiny nit-picking". After he received heavy criticism he started claiming that his reviews were satirical rants not meant to be taken seriously. Nobody bought it.
In Fairly Oddparents when Timmy releases an action movie at a film festival, he wins an award because everyone thinks it's a comedy, and accepts it.
The Simpsons: When it was first realeased, "Homer's Enemy" was not a well-received episode with many fans feeling that it was too dark, lacked humor and that Homer was portrayed as overly bad-mannered. The creators later claimed that all of this was intentional and that the episode was intended to show how a real person could not survive in Springfield. While some fans accept this, many others feel this was an after-the-fact attempt to justify an episode that wasn't very good.
When Chuck Jones created the Road Runner and Coyote in 1949 for their debut short "Fast And Furry-ous," he originally went out to satirize the typical cartoon where Tom chases Jerry, Elmer chases Bugs Bunny, etc. "As satire," Jones said, "it was a complete and dismal failure." That's because audiences took it as straight comedy, so Jones made it a uniform comedy of errors that rarely deviated under his aegis.
Real Life
Jake Knotts, South Carolina State Senator wasn't being a racist when he called Nikki Haley, a Republican candidate for his state's governor and an ethnic Punjabi that converted to Methodist Christianity from Sikhism, a "raghead" (and Obama a secret Muslim in the same breath). He was being satirical. And just quoting a Saturday Night Live skit that exists only in his head.
Maybe he was counting on Refuge in Audacity: "See, of course no one would actually say that in public (especially about a woman who, for all intents and purposes, looks perfectly European-American), so it had to have been meant for humor. Right?"
Marmite. During the 2010 UK general election, the makers of the product threatened legal action after the British National Party included a jar of Marmite in one of their videos. The BNP originally claimed their video had been a parody, and only later admitted that it was a mistake.
Martha Coakley claims to have been joking when, in a segue from Giuliani to Curt Schilling, she commented that they were both Yankees fans, and when the reporter reacted as you might expect, didn't seem to know who Schilling was. Here's the transcript. You be the judge.
Ray Comfort, "Banana-Man," now claims that his infamous "Banana: The Atheist's Worst Nightmare" argument was satire. For those who haven't seen it, in a video released to creationist groups, he makes an argument for intelligent design from how apparently perfect bananas are for human consumption. This ignores the fact that bananas as we know them are the product of centuries of selection and crossbreeding by growers and that wild bananas are much less human-friendly, with thicker skins, less sweet flesh, and large inedible seeds. No matter what your take on the subject, it seems more likely to have just been an unresearched argument than an attempt at satirizing... whatever the hell it was allegedly satirizing.
PETA created a videogame about a tanuki trying to reclaim its skinned fur from Mario and said that the Mario games were sending the message that it was okay to wear fur. After the expected backlash and a even provoking an official statement from Nintendo, PETA later claimed it was all "tongue-in-cheek".
Georgia Congressman Hank Johnson claims he was only joking when he was voicing his concern for Guam capsizing.
