Pop quiz: is this flyer◊ declaring polio vaccine, water treatment, and psychology to be communist plots to destroy America a real pamphlet, or a parody of fervent 1950s "Red scare" tactics? (Answer: it's real!)
"Satire doesn't stand a chance against reality anymore."
— Jules Feiffer in 1959
The core idea of Poe's law is that a parody of something extreme can be mistaken for the real thing, and if a real thing sounds extreme enough, it can be mistaken for a parody (all because parodies are intrinsically extreme, in case you haven't noticed it). This can also happen to someone whose picture of the opposing position is such a grotesque caricature that it renders them unable to tell parody from reality. Reality and parody are further blended by the fact that something that started as a parody might turn into a Windmill Political that some people take as gospel and go to a very serious (if not literal) war.
According to the trope namers, Rational Wiki, Poe's Law was formulated by Nathan Poe, referring to the Flame Wars on Christian forums where Creationism vs. Evolution was discussed: Many users posted parody comments, which were followed by both angry replies and supportive ones. Poe phrased his law thus: "Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake it for the genuine article."
While Poe's Law referred originally to religious fundamentalists it can also equally apply to rigid atheism, dogmaticsocialism or communism, excessivecapitalism, extreme environmentalism, crazyfeminism, or indeed, absolutely any other debate where controversy runs high and at least one position is particularly extreme, such as the infamous North Korean Twitter feed that got mistaken for the real thing.
It can also refer to the idea (supported by a different Poe) that a poem should be short enough that the reader's mind does not wander, but that's something else entirely.
A similar notion was named "The Harry Golden Rule" by Calvin Trillin: "The Harry Golden Rule, properly stated, is that in present-day America it's very difficult, when commenting on events of the day, to invent something so bizarre that it might not actually come to pass while your piece is still on the presses." See Stealth Parody, which this law tends to undermine.
Don't Explain the Joke is one of the possible outcomes of this law. Parody Retcons attempt to appeal to this. If a work actually becomes popular as a result of this law, that's Misaimed Fandom. Compare Does Not Understand Sarcasm or Insult Backfire. Compare also the pitfalls of Some of My Best Friends Are X. If you are trying to invoke this trope to get people to believe something you just made up to feign legitimacy, it's a Bavarian Fire Drill. Many a "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer is used to avoid this trope. See also The Tyson Zone.
To really turn this trope into a brain-twister compare it with Death Of The Author.
NOTE: When adding an example, please cite a specific instance or instances of the relevant work being either mistaken for a parody or being analyzed to determine whether or not it is serious. Any examples that shoehorn in a work with Weasel Words or the like but without such instances being cited (i.e. something along the lines of "this could easily be mistaken for a parody", "this might as well have been a parody", or "some people have a hard time believing this is real" with little else) will be assumed to be Complaining About Shows You Don't Like and will be deleted as such.
Examples:
A YouTube user named Tamtampamela had a channel on which she posed as a satire of fundementalist Christians but when she put up a video thanking God for the Japanese earthquake, saying that he had caused it to punish Japan's atheist population, it immediately went viral and she started receiving death threats, causing her to eventually come clean that it was a parody.
It probably didn't help her that Glenn Beck said pretty much the same thing and seemed to mean it.
The Late Show with David Letterman ran a sketch to parody modern, post-modern, and abstract artwork. The segment was titled "Ape or Artist?" Each sketch would put a spotlight on a large canvas with an abstract splattering and smearing of paints. David Letterman, musicians in the band, audience members, and occasionally guest experts, would then try to figure out if the painting was done by a professional artist, or an ape playing with paint. The parody was so flawlessly executed that several guests with university degrees in art and art history were unable to distinguish whether or not the painting was ape-splatter or professional modern art.
The Alt Text of one xkcdsuggests trying this on a noted pit of stupidity and prejudice - "Fun game: try to post a YouTube comment so stupid that people realize you must be joking. (Hint: this is impossible.)"
This very trope gets parodied, believe it or not, with this quiz which tasks the viewer with discerning whether Mitt Romney or Charlie Bucket said each of the listed quotes while asking "Is there even a difference?" (Here's a tip: Charlie isn't the one talking about politics.)
The now defunct blog AntiSpore (a parody blog from supposedly a Christian Creationist taking issue with the themes Spore had on Evolution) fooled many gamers and even websites like Kotaku and Joystiq, at least until some very obvious notes on the blog's "Real About Page" were added, like the following:
Even after this, people kept up arguing against him for over a thousand comments; there's over 2500 total, and the balance slowly shifts to people actually getting the joke, but toward the end there's still one or two condemning him as a bigot. Most of them apparently didn't even read the entry, and some of them who did read it, and pointed out he'd gotten the Bible verses wrong.
Though it's possible that the latter is too a very confusing example of Poe's Law, in that we don't get that they're correcting the verse ironically.
The Onion is the embodiment of this trope, its satirical articles often being mistaken for real ones, while real extremist articles are often suspected of being Onion articles.
An article called "Harry Potter Sparks Rise In Satanism Among Children", in which six year old girls claim that "Jesus died because he was weak and stupid" was copied into a furious chain letter and circulated about the web. Commentators noted that many of the article's more obviously parodic passages were excised from the letter, suggesting that the poster may not have believed it him/herself. Regardless, it worked, triggering a panicked reaction among fundamentalists, in spite of (or perhaps because of) it ending with J.K. Rowling praising Satan.
Possibly the very same article led to a concerned parent sending mail to Reader's Digest, criticizing them about interviewing Rowling. After a bit of back-and-forth the reader mentioned reading about it on The Onion whereupon Reader's Digest pointed out that it's a humor paper, and Rowling is not really a Satan worshiper.
The AV Club posted an article about how Glenn Beck loved the Spider-Man musical. Since both Glenn Beck and Spider Man Turn Off The Dark are polarizing topics which often spark fierce discussions, a lot of people thought this was just The Onion making stuff up, even though the AV Club is the non-satire section. It's not a joke. He really did enjoy the musical.
The blog Literally Unbelievable chronicles people taking Onion articles at face value and posting them on Facebook. It is as hilariously depressing as it sounds. Poe's Law applies recursively here, as it's impossible to tell whether the Facebookers are just playing along with the joke.
The most controversial "Onion" example is their "Kelly" political cartoons, which still have people arguing about whether they're expressing or parodying conservative ideas. Although the real focus of the cartoons is less ideological than parodying the artistic cliches of bad, lazy political cartoons independent of any specific viewpoint.
Iran's FARS news agency fell for an Onion article that said more Americans would prefer Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be president than Obama. This is somewhat understandable from a country that believes Hollywood is controlled by Washington.
Then again, Hollywood does crank out some Zero Dark Thirty grade crud...
China's People's Daily Online reported as straight news the Onion story declaring North Korean leader Kim Jong Un the "sexiest man alive for 2012."
The Colbert Report. Colbert plays a right-wing pundit, but the show in general is against right-wing pundits. Many conservatives were convinced that Colbert was a real neoconservative and the show was a parody of the way the left views the right. See this Ohio State University study for more on the topic.
There's also a pervasive myth that he was mistaken for a real conservative pundit by members of the Bush administration when he was invited to the 2006 correspondents' dinner; the dinner was in large part a traditional roast of the President, and they knew exactly who he was, although they may not have expected him to be quiteso harsh.
Some conservatives realize that Colbert is a parody but believe that he makes correct points in character. In other words, the Strawman Has a Point. Colbert himself exacerbates this by frequently picking up on recent talking points of various conservatives in the news, then expanding upon them. This makes it difficult for some to actually understand he is parodying them, particularly when he begins a rant following talking points that many of the more extreme commentators in the media voiced a day or two before.
Ebert admitted that the paradox is true of all satire, to some extent. In order to poke fun at something, you first have to play it straight, and unless you beat your audience over the head with the point that you really don't agree with what you're depicting, there's always going to be someone who takes you seriously.
Salvador Dali once sent a telegram for Romania's communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, for his adoption of a scepter as part of his regalia. Dalí's intent was to mock him, but Ceauşescu, who had one of the biggest personality cults ever, took it seriously, and the text was published in the Party's newspaper. When he did find out it was a joke, he fired the editor who published it. Never mind that he was the one who ordered it to be published.
Endemic at Conservapedia, a site created by right wingers upset at certain things said in Wikipedia. As soon as it was founded, people descended on it writing completely-over-the-top articles, which some people took seriously. Their serious projects include a translation of the Bible into Conservative language. For instance, the whole "easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven" thing is apparently socialist, and "blessed are the meek" should really be "blessed are the God-fearing".
Here's a particularly funny example of (apparent) stealth-parody vandalism.
Or read their page on Barack Obama, or any Democratic president of the 20th century. But especially Obama.
- Religion: Claims to be Christian
- As of May 25, 2012, says Religion: probably Muslim
- On April 27, 2011 Obama officially released his long form birth certificate, which many experts have determined to be a fake and no legal body has determined its authenticity.
The Conservapedia article on George W. Bush once said that he was "one of the greatest presidents in American history," that he was "successfully able to salvage the Hurricane Katrina rescue effort after it was sabotaged by a Democratic/Islamo-Fascist conspiracy" and that his unpopularity is entirely due to him being forced by the Democratic Congress to push through bank bailout packages.
The root of the issue is that the site's proprietor, Andy Schlafly, keeps the site under tight control. The number of satirists has led him to become ever more paranoid and ban-happy... the result being that only the parodists remain◊, driving him ever-deeper into his mad spiral of paranoid banning.
Rational Wiki speculates that this is the first living example of a "Poe Paradox"—that in any given fundamentalist group, any new person/idea sufficiently fundamentalist to be accepted by the group will come off as being so ridiculous as to risk being called a parodist or a parody.
This evolved into meta-humor once this entry made its way on there - particularly with this laughable assertion:
"Clearly, the cause of the mistake is not that the genuine article is no better than a mockery; rather, the cause of the mistake is that some people lack the critical thinking skills and/or experience to differentiate the two."
The caption below the picture of the Black Cat and number 13 on that page is even more hilarious. It quotes a Wall Street Journal article to claim that Christianity reduces belief in superstitions, yet the "unlucky 13" pictured is a superstition that has its origins in Christianity.
A frequent issue with internet discussions, especially since you can't actually hear people talk and thus can only give them a tone of voice from your own imagination.
Roger Ebert went political and wrote a blog post giving a statement of creationist beliefs, with the intention of making a point about people's inability to recognize irony. While many people did see the satire, a significant number of readers either thought he was being serious or assumed the site had been hacked. PZ Myers criticized the article, pointing out that when there are so many people making the same claims without irony, the joke becomes undetectable to anyone who doesn't already know Ebert's stance on the issue.
There are still people who have to have it pointed out to them that A Modest Proposal is not intended literally. A Modest Proposal was Jonathan Swift's satirical essay that suggested solving the problem of working-class children in Ireland being a drag on their parents by selling them for food to rich people. Most interpretations read it as a satire of British attitudes towards the working-class of Ireland. It created a scandal because some people didn't get the joke (Swift intended a scandal, but not like that). Modern readers who take it seriously justify their stance with Swift's misanthropy and deteriorating mental condition later in his life. At the time of the writing however, he had no such attitudes or problems.
Similar misunderstandings occur with modern tributes, such as this letter◊ commending Miami University for expelling a student for this poster◊ which was created to replace a poster put in the men's bathroom which characterized rapists as males. It referenced a "Johnathan S" (name withheld for privacy) who advocated baby-eating, and advocated the burning of his book (held in the Miami University library) by the same principle under which the poster was removed.
Popehat closed their fake Twitter account for North Korea's propaganda ministry after legitimate news agencies started picking up stories from it.
In Religulous, Bill Maher disguises himself and starts preaching the actual tenets of Scientology on a park, naturally, most people laugh at him and call him crazy, unaware that those were Scientologists' real beliefs.
This also showed up in the South Park episode "Trapped in the Closet" when an official narrates Xenu's origin story. The phrase, "This is what Scientologists actually believe" was put in because it would've been indistinguishable from the show's weird humor to those who didn't already know the story. Even then, some people still didn't believe it, because even that sounds like something South Park would do.
The 16th season episode "Sarcastaball" revolves around a game which Randy invents as parody, but which everyone else takes seriously.
"John Clarke and Bryan Dawe" are an Australian comedy duo that satirize politicians and other public figures. A quick glance at the comments on the YouTube page shows how many people think they're for real. Given that each of those sketches involve John Clarke playing all of the political figures without any change in voice, costume or makeup, anyone who watches more than one should very quickly realize that he is not both Prime Minister Rudd and Senator Stephen Conroy, but is in fact a sketch comedian.
It should, of course, be even more obvious that he is not Rudd's successor, Julia Gillard.
When Internet Infidels Discussion Board decided to start a contest of making parodies of the creationist organization Answers in Genesis cartoons, they received a cease and desist letter from the latter claiming that the parodies "clearly (are) likely to cause confusion as to the affiliation between your client and my client..." Here's an example: original◊ and parody◊.
Performance artists The Yes Men have made a career out of this, or at least they did during the Bush administration. One of their projects included passing out surveys - http://theyesmen.org/petitions/pdfs/petition-terrorathome.pdf - under their "Yes, Bush Can!" slogan letterhead, urging people at Republican rallies to specify the rights they were willing to waive in the name of the War on Terror. They had assumed people would be shocked, but instead the audiences filled them out and turned them back in.
Brass Eye, which hoodwinked British celebrities into participating in fictional public information films, culminating in a Member of the British Parliament raising a question in the House of Commons about the ludicrous made-up drug "cake".
There were "scientific" papers and conferences that swallowed and processed nonsensical, but imitating their style and language papers, only to discover they were punned:
Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravityby Alan Sokal. Alan Sokal, a physicist who was severely annoyed at scientifically-illiterate deconstructionist philosophers trying to work quantum physics into their philosophy, submitted a paper to the journal Social Text which declared "quantum gravity"—and ultimately reality itself—to be a social construct. Social Text accepted it. Right after printing it he notified them it was a logically inconsistent rambling as bad as he could write without using mushrooms. Oops. Social Text was annoyed; they thought that the paper had merit, and, according to them, while the editors themselves didn't think reality was a social construct, they thought that Sokal thought it was!
WMSCI 2005 accepted an article Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy. The only value it has for computer science is the fact that this garbage wasn't even written by a human, but by a pseudorandom text generator. Then these pranksters went to the conference, held a "technical" session and read a few more randomly generated speeches with straight faces. It's all there — along with the Open Source text generator.
This is the basic premise of Rick Mercer's Talking to Americans where he travels around the US asking people about fake Canadian news stories. The show even got the better of some soon to be well known American politicians here.
Just as YouTube user potholer54 was about to nominate a creationist for his 2008 Golden Crocoduck Award (given to the creationists who knowingly and most effectively lied to support their arguments), the creationist outed himself as a satirist. Despite this, potholer explained that one of his arguments (the rings of Saturn prove a young solar system) is actually used by some creationists. Watch for yourself here.
Syndicated columnist Jack Kilpatrick once wrote a column purporting to be an interview with an ACLU leader named Eton "Si" Eritas. Eritas claimed he was determined to remove all traces of religion from America, going so far as to change the names of any cities with religious connotations, such as San Francisco and St. Paul. This column shocked many people and sparked countless columns and letters to the editor flaming the ACLU. The only problem? Eritas didn't exist. Eton "Si" Eritas, spelled backwards, is "Note: Is Satire."
In 1985 MIT pranksters managed to get a sculpture included in an exhibition at MIT's List Visual Art Center. Titled "No Knife", it consisted of an overturned wastebasket on which was a dining hall tray, plate, bowl, glass, fork and two spoons. It was accompanied by an artist's statement describing it as "a study in mixed media earth tones", and going on to praise and interpret it ("The casual formalism of the place setting draws upon our common internal instincts of existential persistence to unify us with the greater consciousness of human bondage") in a parody of the style of art criticism. It took the gallery staff several hours to discover it was not actually part of the exhibition.
A group of students at Rice once assembled a bunch of junk brought up from a college basement in the middle of the college's quad and declared it to be art, just to see if anyone would believe them. They ended up winning an award and receiving a small grant, and the thing stayed up for the entire semester.
Can we get at least a year-date on this to permit confirmation?
When Private Eye ran a mock-up Daily Telegraph cover, parodying the MP Expenses Scandal the paper broke but targeting its proprietors, the reclusive Barcley Brothers, they received a letter threatening them with libel action. Their response was that it was in the "joke" section of the magazine, it clearly wasn't a real news story, and they didn't think there was a case to answer.
Private Eye gets this from many newcomers who don't know where the cut-off points between the 'investigative journalism' pages and the 'parody' pages are. There are a lot of otherwise intelligent people who think From the Message Boards (a parody of Internet arguments which containseverythingyou'dencounter in a real Internet debate) is genuine.
Valerie Solanas, infamous for shooting Andy Warhol, was also known for her SCUM Manifesto, (with SCUM believed to stand for Society for Cutting Up Men) her infamous rant about how the world would be a better place without men. Even though The SCUM Manifesto is generally taken at face value, Solanas did claim that it was satire, with academics such as Laura Winkiel arguing on her behalf
A viral marketing ploy for the movie Hell's Half Acre created the WUCP, an organization that represents the What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids? mentality to the most logical extreme by acting shocked when they see the movie trailer and are appalled that this is being passed off as children entertainment and call for it to be banned. It's so over the top that no one would believe it was real, right? Well, as a look at the comments will point out, many people took it seriously. On a plus side, the movie producers did get quite a bit of free publicity.
The Bonsai Kitten web site, which admittedly was a very sick joke, was a joke nevertheless (close inspection of several of the photographs revealed that they were obviously posed, such as a kitten supposedly "in" a bottle being actually behind it). Still, the site drew tons of protests, including several chain letters, from those who failed to grasp the parody.
Even for those who accept it's parody, the argument goes that those who take it for real might try and do that to actual kittens.
In a strange case, creationist speaker Kent Hovind earned the P.T. Barnum "One Born Every Minute" Award when he incorporated information of the finding of man and dinosaur fossils co-existing and the government cover-up of this discovery, from a website into his lectures as evidence against evolution. In reality, the website was a fake one (and somewhat conspicuously so) that the New Mexicans for Science and Reason (NMSR) had set up as an April Fool's Day prank.
Several YouTube videos, such as the famous "Angry German Kid" video were originally made to satirize how German politicians saw gamers. Unfortunately, if you ask around today, most people won't actually know it's faked because of how easy it is to put on a show for the camera.
Another famous video, the Greatest Freakout Ever: At least 3/5 of the comments were "Boy, this is what World of Warcraft does to people?!?", ignoring that you can replace "World of Warcraft" with "Xbox Live" or "EverQuest" and it'd still make sense...or that. The internet still seems to be divided between those who think it was fake and those who think it was real, without any conclusive proof one way or the other.
Detractors often point to the over-the-top reactions of Steven (the freakout kid) as clearly being acted.
Supports often cite the other freakout videos posted of Steven, in which he destroys a microwave, as well as a Christmas tree, and attacks a car with a baseball bat. This would require the parents to be in on the lie as well, which would seem unlikely. This implies that it is much more likely that Steven is simply an out of control teen who acts out, rather then a complex hoax designed to deceive the internet. One wouldn't want to completely assume it's real, though. There is one video where Jack (the filmer) puts the camera in his room and ties the door shut and then gets Steven's attention. However, there was another video of the exact same thing where Steven has what would appear to be a pickle inside his underwear and Jack did the same prank. Jack then said that Steven saw the video, made him remove it and make another one... which was the one with the Gag Penis. For some reason, Steven's acting a lot more irrational in the "Remake". Wafflepwn (Jack) removed both. Several things seem to be just freak coincidences, such as Steven "finding out" about the videos when he supposedly found out about one of those videos earlier (and is apparently very stupid as both vids had "part", as well as titles and he didn't look for it), conveniently walking in during an interview... and not once has he ever gone after the camera. And he obviously knows that Jack's filming... isn't it weird that if he does have such a rabid temper and only has enough control to say "Turn off that camera" or "stop filming", since he apparently knows his brother has put videos on the internet? One would assume he'd grab that camera and smash it rather than screaming or hitting something replaceable.
Tech parody site B Bspot ran an article claiming that the MPAA was lobbying Congress to pass a law requiring anyone who owns a home theater setup to purchase a home theater license, and additionally, that they would require people to install surveillance devices to make sure there were no unauthorized home screenings. Even though the site only runs parodies and not actual news, they had to run a second article explaining this fact to all the people who read it and thought it was real.
The HMS STFU copied the Harry Potter section that was on our own Warp That Aesop page circa January 2011 as seen here. Most of the commenters took it as real Fan Wank with only a few considering that it might be a joke. Then again, The HSM STFU usualy deals with people who have similar or worse positions in total seriousness - they were the ones who discovered The Girl Who Lived, Hogwarts Exposed, The Last War, and the complete works of pstibbons and Robst, after all.
The infamous Zelda video The Light Of Courage has an interesting case of something being both incorrectly mistaken for a parody and something fully serious at the same time. The animation behind the videos was purposefully kept bad as was the voice acting. However the dialog, grammatical errors, and storyline the videos were based on are all real and was done with the serious attempt to get them made into a movie. Aside from the few who know the story behind The Light of Courage, most people can't seem to figure out whether it's real or not. It was based on a horrible fanfic that it's creator took completely serious, then someone else created the parody by adding purposefully badly done animation and voiceacting. Also the case for the infamous "Half-Life: Full Life Consequences" video, though this one is more universally recognized as a joke.
Older Than Feudalism: Scenes from Aristophanes over-the-top parody of Socrates, The Clouds, were cited in Socrates' trial as if they were real evidence against him. You know, the one that ended with him forced to drink hemlock?
Cracked.com has two articles about "Satirists Attacked by People Who Totally Missed the Point," here and here.
Also, see this article about how the blogger meant to come off as so ridiculous that nobody could take it seriously... and the media thought he was being literal.
It shouldn't take long to realize that this article about Lord of the Rings is a parody. But according to the comments, some people still didn't get it.
Cracked.com has also argued that the Reaganite fantasy Red Dawn 1984 is actually a parody of resurgent Cold War paranoia, claiming that the film actually used Getting Crap Past the Radar to be highly critical of the United States.
The Guardian finally pokes fun at the long standing leftist idea that promoting humans rights in totalitarian hellholes is the modern definition of "imperialism". Doesn't it?
The jury is still out as to whether Timecube is real or a parody of schizophrenic antisemitic conspiracy theorists. It doesn't help that Gene Ray is a Reclusive Artist.
Sarah Palin mocked the way her opponents obsess over minor misstatements of hers by releasing a blog post consisting entirely of erroneous statements made by President Barack Obama. At least some of her detractors criticized the new "mistakes" from Mrs. Palin.
Reimagined with common knowledge that Sarah Palin said, "I can see Russia from my house!" ...via Tina Fey's parody.
Opinions are split on whether Niccolò Machiavelli's most well-known piece, The Prince, is a satirical Take That at the Medici who had recently had him brutally beaten or a genuine article giving advice to monarchical rulers.
Bernard de Mandeville, a Dutch physician in the XVIII century, wrote a poem named The Fable of Bees, which was a satire to the moralist campaigns of the time. The poem caused public commotion in the time, because he wrote that the vices of the people can be useful to the society, but today is regarded as a serious economic tract and many economists complain that it's hard to interpret him. It's hard because Mandeville wrote it as a satire; he didn't have any pretension to make a scientific tract.
In 1989, some people took seriously a humorous piece proving that Lenin was a mushroom.
A group parodying the Tea Party released videos advocating a boycott of Disney's Aladdin on the grounds that it was Islamic propaganda. Many were confused as to whether the videos were serious or not, but in this case the fact that it was believable as a Tea Party position was part of the point of the parody.
Or for that matter, anything fronted by Billy Milano (S.O.D. and M.O.D. most notably). Flame wars have been fought over whether songs like "Speak English or Die" are satire or serious.
Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue." Is it a genuine (if a little overheated) expression of Patriotic Fervor, or an ironic glorification of the Eagleland (Flavor 2) mentality? It's really hard to tell. The song starts off sincere and heartfelt enough, but the abrupt shift from "melancholy" to "kickass" is bizarre enough to inspire at least a few self-aware chuckles. It gets even more confusing if you watch the music video, which backs up the lyrics with an intense montage of various U.S. military bombs, missiles, and fighter jets, looking almost like a Technicolor Dr. Strangelove. On balance: since most country/western songs don't feature so much violent or militaristic imagery, it's easy to see this as a spoof; however, the song's Crowning Music of Awesome and throat-grabbing finale make you want to take it at face value. So, all things being equal, it's all probably being played straight.
Housos is a Black Comedy of Australia's working-class bludgers (i.e. the working-class who don't work). Two current affairs programs aired hard-hitting 'exposés' on this offensive new Reality Show. Interestingly, when they realised the show was fake they tried a new angle, complaining about tax-payers money being used to subsidise filth. The show's home channel, SBS, raised all the funds itself. All in all, the Housos creator was happy at the hilarious free publicity, while the current affairs shows got publicity of the wrong kind altogether.
In his short story collection Famous Monsters, Kim Newman mentions that Penguin Books asked him to tone down the politics of his story "Pitbull Brittan", a savage satire on Conservatism based on the question "What would it look like if everything the Daily Mail said was true?" To his bafflement, their objection was on the assumption that he was saying the world was like this.
PolitiChicks, a right-wing "answer" to The View, has led to endless discussion in the comment section (as well as on anumber of othersites) about whether it's serious or a parody, with the fact that Saturday Night Live alumna Victoria Jackson is involved causing the impression that it's all a skit. Of course The View has comedians as part of their panel too, and if Victoria Jackson's not genuinely the conservative tea-partier that every bit of public speaking she's done in the last four years indicates, then she's reached Andy Kauffman levels of Stealth Parody.
Swedish humor show Grotesco featured a song called Det är bögarnas fel ("It's the gay men's fault") which became a hit and can be watched here. It's a textbook example of this trope. The song is sung by a reverend who claims that gay men are to blame for every single bad thing in the world and sings that "I don't know the line and verse, chapter or part, but somewhere in [the Bible] it says that it's the gay men's fault." He and lots of other singers then go on to give gay men the blame for things that clearly aren't gay men's fault. One woman sings that "My son shot four people to death with the hunting-rifle. Somehow, I feel that it's the gay men's fault." A man sings that "I once ate porridge and confused curry for cinnamon, and that wasn't carelessness, no, it was the gay men's fault." It's almost impossible to imagine how it could be more obviously satiric, and still, when it was performed live on the family show Allsång på Skansen, somebody reported the show to the police for being upsetting to homosexuals.
Considering that gays were indees blamed for earthquakes, hurricane Sandy and several other (recent) calamities by religious officials...
The death of Cass Elliot also factors into this; after collapsing from a heart attack, investigators noted that a sandwich was found in her room and, despite a post-mortem showing otherwise, parodies regarding her weight and the poor wording of the attending physician mean it's still widely believed that she choked to death on a sandwich simply because it's considered more humorous.
When G4 held their 2011 VideoGame Deathmatch and pitted The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim against The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, the Zelda Universe fansite posted an article sarcastically imploring their readers to help Skyrim, "our favorite game," help win the vote. So many people in the comments took it at face value that ZU had to post another article explaining that it was meant to be a joke. Incidentally, the comments themselves exhibit this trope as well; site members who got the joke tried to partake of the sarcasm in their own comments and got said comments voted down to as low as -20.
In a combination of this and Stealth Parody, Jethro Tull recorded the album Thick As A Brick as a deliberately over-the-top parody of concept albums and the Progressive Rock genre, after the pevious album Aqualung was mistakenly called a concept album by the music press. It is widely considered one of the best progressive rock albums ever made, by music fans and journalists likely unaware that the work was a parody. Bandleader Ian Anderson still gets remarks from fans about how much older the fictitious child prodigy poet (Gerald Bostock) depicted in the cover art and album credits who "wrote" the lyrics to the album must be now in the present day.
However, the follow-up album A Passion Play is apparently a straightforward example, despite having the same structure.
Years later, Anderson also claimed that it was a parody of the concept albums by Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer however at the time "Thick as a Brick" it was released, neither Yes nor ELP had even released one (Yes' would come two years later with "Tales From Topographic Oceans" and ELP would never release a concept album in their history) so it is quite possible that Anderson is being a bit of an Unreliable Narrator. He would finally embrace the concept in June 2012 when he released "Thick as a Brick 2."
Prior to the release of James Cameron's sci-fi epic Avatar, a curious blog popped up called "Stop Avatar Movie." The blog's editor claims to be a transgender woman who is offended by the "heterosexual themes" found in the movie (namely, the apparent lack of non-heterosexual, non-cisgender characters), and urges people to boycott it. She goes so far as to make Avatar the scapegoat for anything in the wider culture that is or could be remotely construed as homophobic/transphobic, regardless of whether or not the thing or incident being discussed has anything to do with the film. The political and social views expressed on the blog are so extreme that even actual gay people are divided on whether the author is just a very dedicated troll, or legitimately insane.
Similarly the Radical Feminist blog "Femonade." is widely regarded as an inspired parody due to it's relentless use of feminist tropes ('all heterosexual sex is coerced', 'all of the internet is porn', 'all men are bad', 'all transsexuals are men subverting women') taken to an unsustainable extreme. Comments against the blog consist of trolls trying to outdo each other, although including the occasional poster who is not in on the joke and would seem to believe it to be real.
Radio host Phil Hendrie makes a living on this trope. His radio show consists of a stable of guests that he regularly interviews (the president of a home-owners association, the owner of a restaurant that supposedly sponsors the show, the head of a local activist group, etc.) discussing a current event of some sort, with the guest having some wild, ridiculous, and sometimes offensive opinion on the matter. This prompts listeners to call the show and incredulously berate the guest, whose rhetoric becomes more and more ludicrous as the segment goes on. The joke? All of the guests are voiced by Hendrie, who essentially is having a conversation with himself using a phone handset in the studio.
In some forms of humour or advertising, it can be hard to tell the difference between the mocking of 'extreme' masculinity seen in Testosterone Poisoning and whether the creators think it's genuinely OK to hold men to those standards (of those that have a theme that things should be this way, joke or not); enforcement of masculinity can get so ridiculous as to be difficult to distinguish from parody.
As a satire of excessive capitalism, an artist made a bench that you must pay to sit on; overstay your purchased welcome and the bench will impale you with steel spikes. And now, a Chinese park owner who didn't get the joke actually wants to install these in his park to prevent hobos from hanging around on the benches. Yeah, that's gonna end well...
During The Second Google Incident, several works were cutlisted in protest to say "This zero-tolerance policy will likely cut this". While obvious ultrafamous works like Romeo and Juliet*
had little risk, Black Bird ended up being cut for real (it was restored afterwards).
Regretsy, a website that makes fun of ridiculous Etsy products (its tagline is "Where DIY Meets WTF") recently debuted a column called "Etsy or Regretsy?", where they intersperse actual bizarre Etsy listings with parodies created by the Regretsy staff, and have the readers guess which are real and which are fake. It's harder than you'd think.
The Rap Critic states this as the problem with Ke$ha: She's supposedly a parody of current music, but when "serious" artists are making songs that are just as ridiculous, it's hard to tell.
Right-wing British paper "The Daily Mail" recently decided to make fun of their readers with an article about how right-wing voters are stupider; while the article was intended to be an obvious satire (as no paper would be stupid enough to flat out insult their readers), the less intelligent readers quite aptly failed to consider it a joke, which prompted Guardian writer Charlie Brooker to deconstruct it:
An example overlapping with "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: one recurring segment of The Chasers War On Everything played subtitled clips from more extreme Middle-Eastern television shows which decried the west in the most ridiculous ways possible, including Tomorrow's Pioneers, a Palestinian childrens' show ripping off Mickey Mouse but encouraging hatred of the west in children. Given what the War on Everything is normally like, one would expect the subtitling to be a Gag Sub, an exaggeration for comedic purposes. In a great example of Poe's Law in action, it was actually legit - they had to put in disclaimers establishing that The ABC had independently confirmed the legitimacy and accuracy of the subtitles.
Yahoo! Answers has Colonel Jack Fessender (Ret.), a longtime poe who has achieved some degree of infamy with way too many people thinking that heisforreal. He is also running for President so he can redesign the letter C so it doesn't so much like an Islamic crescent among other insane things. "FACT."
At the First West Coast Computer Faire, Apple engineer Steve Wozniak had made several gag brochures for a successor to the MITS Altair called the "Zaltair." The ad copy was filled with absurd claims, like having 18 expansion card slots, a new "BAZIC" programming language that could be rewritten by the user, and a case that will "add to the decor of any living room." People bombarded the MITS stand with questions about the new model, and it wasn't until late in the day that anyone caught on to the joke. Today, these brochures are highly sought-after collector's items.
The "Laughing scene" in Final Fantasy X, which was intentionally made to sound fake and over-the-top was mistaken as a legit attempt at acting and held up as an example of poor-English voice acting.
The "Bert is Evil" site photoshopped the Sesame Street character in with various historical villains. The one of him standing with Osama Bin Laden made its way onto an anti-American protest poster in Bangladesh.
The "Amanda Bieber" Twitter account (more info here) is notorious for criticizing other musicians in praise of Justin Bieber. Her(?) comments are so full of ignorance (e.g. Kurt Cobain is inferior to Bieber because he never got big on Twitter, France is an Islamic country) and hateful vitriol (nonwhite people need to leave America, gays shouldn't have rights) that she must be a Troll. Right?
Thankfully, yes. About a month after her Kurt Cobain rant, it was revealed that "Amanda Bieber" was really the sock account of a Lady Gaga fangirl (or is she?) named "Tobey Monster".
The movie C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America is a mockumentary based on an alternate history where the Confederacy wins the Civil War. Said mockumentary details an America, with slavery as part of modern way life, bat-shit crazy politics dictated and decided in part by the desire and need for human chattel, and numerous fictional, parody products with extremely racist overtones. Then the mockumentary comes to its conclusion, and you find out that a lot of those ridiculous, over the top products that couldn't possibly exist, actually did, and were actually being sold for decades. The whole totalitarian plot to conquer the entire New World from top to bottom, that sounds like the alternate ending for the 90's Wild Wild West movie: yeah that was actually the plan all along, and something the Confederacy would have attempted had they won the Civil War. Suddenly, the mockumentary, while still a bit ham-handed in presentation, becomes a little more uncomfortable to watch...
In an Onion-like newspaper in Mexico named El Deforma, there was a note about Samsung paying 1 billion dolars to Apple in coins of 5 cents. The note spread among othernewspapers, one of them, from Yahoo News (already deleted). There was another article making further fun about it.
Less Wrong's perennial feud with Rational Wiki means that this is bound to happen eventually. Notably, somebody (it is unknown exactly who) Photoshopped a picture of Eliezer Yudkowsky giving a presentation. In his original slide, Yudkowsky was merely showing that it is theoretically possible for there to exist beings just as far above humans as humans are above chimpanzees, presumably to give a better idea of what the world post-Singularity would be like. The Photoshop job adds three markers to the scale: Omega, God, and, above all of them, Eliezer Yudkowsky. For a long time, Rational Wiki included this picture in their article on Yudkowsky, implying that he believes he is the most intelligent being in the universe, apparently unaware that it was Photoshopped. For the record, not even Yudkowsky is that arrogant. However, Rational Wiki has a history of including parodic images in articles to poke fun at their subjects, so it is quite possible that they knew it was a joke.
Is this a conservative parody of Barack Obama or a liberal parody of what conservatives think of Obama? (Based on the uploader's other videos, it's apparently the former.)
The comics of Dick Hafer were intended to be serious conservative satire, but the way they're written they come off as a parody.
This story from NPR's The World. The Serbian satire website NJUZ (pronounced "nyews", and self-admittedly The OnionIN THE BALKANS!) ran a fake story about a Serbian man who got drunk and jumped in the ocean, and landed on a shark, killing it. Macedonia's official news agency got hold of it and ran it as a real story, and things went downhill from there.
Nobody really knows if My Immortal was written seriously or if it's just the work of a troll of legendary prowess.
After years of secrecy English crop circle makers Doug Bower and Dave Chorley decided to fess up to their pranks in 1991, only to find many UFO-believers deciding that although the circles were man-made, the two must have been possessed by aliens who had made the circles through them. As Skeptoid sums up in an episode on crop circles:
It is an interesting world we live in, where you can tell a group of people that you made a crop circle with a rope, even show them how you did it, and they still insist that an unknown paranormal intelligence did it. You can tell them that two plus two equals four and they'll insist that it's five.
U2's Zoo TV tour was intended to be an overt parody of mass media, but ironic content was so subtle that may fans believed their appreciation to be genuine.
Their subsequent Pop Mart Tour upheld the theme of parody. This time, the target was consumer culture; and fans were just as baffled as they had been by Zoo TV.
With some of the weirder or more disturbing Rule 34, it can be hard to tell which ones were meant to be arousing and which ones were just made by Trolls as a joke.
Not Always Right and other such "true story of human idiocy" collections are just plausible enough that it's impossible to know for certain how many of their submissions are genuine, though at least one is a known Urban Legend.
Penn And Teller Bullshit does this often to ridicule the topic they are covering in a particular episode, for example polling hippies on banning water (identified as the scary sounding Dihydrogen Monoxide) or asking for donations to fight global warming with no proof the funds will be used legitimately.
Starcraft was set to be Warcraft IN SPACE! with similarly primitive graphics until an upstart game called Dominion Storm totally outshone it. Blizzard then went back to the drawing board until Starcraft looked the way it does now. The kicker? Dominion Storm was a complete hoax. And the gamers rejoiced forevermore for the unintended consequences.
The government of Malaysia took issue with Unclyclopedia's entry on the country. It's not certain if they were displeased with the site while thinking it's a for-real or a parody.
Iranian news saw an image by satire site The People's Cube showing Iran Hearts Jews, and took it for realz
It's fun watching people get outraged at spoof Twitter accounts on the assumption they're real. One person tweeted the "Daily Mail Style Guide" account to tell them they were "beyond parody". In response to a tweet calling Bob Cratchit "Employee of entrepreneur. Understands that high wages kill jobs, so won't ask for a rise despite his greedy family's nagging". Also the number of people who reply to "Kurt Cobain Quotes" to point out that Kurt Cobain never said any of those things. Or worse yet, seem to think he did (or are they just entering into the spirit of the thing?)
It got meta when another Daily Mail parody account pretended that Anonymous had mistaken them for the real Daily Mail Twitter feed and hacked them, and a number of their followers took that seriously...
An in-universe example would be Leo and Max's 'Springtime for Hitler' gambit in The Producers; they aimed to produce the biggest flop ever so they could make off with the investment money, so they took in a story glorifying Hitler and made it as offensive as they could. Unfortunately, the actor playing Hitler himself was so terrible that the audience assumed that it was a parody, and the show sold out. The director deciding to throw in some catchy musical segments didn't help.
In the musical version the former Nazi Franz who will be playing the part of Hitler breaks his leg just prior to curtain, and is replaced by the director — who turns flamboyant up to eleven.
Roger Ebert noted that this is what actually torpedoed Leo and Max's scam. If they had gone all out (i.e, featured the Holocaust or Operation Barbarossa in their pro-Nazi musical), then their plan would actually have worked, as nobody would want to see satire that distasteful.
Taken to something of a logical extreme in Homestuck, where Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, Dave's Stylistic Suck webcomic, is described as "a webcomic ironically maintained through a satirical cipher" with "legions of devoted fans, most of whom are totally convinced" of his sockpuppet persona's sincerity. A bit of meta irony kicks in when you consider that in real life, Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff actually is much better known than Homestuck and MSPA, and genuinely does have legions of devoted fans (though most of them are well aware of its ironic Stylistic Suck value).
In a Checkerboard Nightmare arc, the titular character creates a children's show centered entirely around promoting himself and his merchandise. Said Merchandise Driven nature is so transparent that the show becomes a hit amongst teenagers and young adults who mistake it for biting satire (the fact that Chex could only afford for the show to be run on a 4AM timeslot didn't help).
In Erasure, an intellectual black author, sick and tired of his philosophical books being passed over for publication because they're not suitably "Black," writes a way, way over the top parody of thuggish ghetto-chic blaxploitation called My Paffology and has his agent send it out as a protest. Random House accepts the book at face value as a fierce portrayal of the Black experience and pays six hundred grand for it. The book, now renamed Fuck, goes on to win the National Book Award.
This is what got the Bill of Life, which allows parents to have their children's body parts be divided and used as transplants once they reach age thirteen, passed in Unwind; it was proposed in order to make both sides in the Heartland War realize how ridiculous they were being. What wasn't expected was both pro-choice and pro-life people to embrace it as the only way to compromise.
In P. G. Wodehouse's short piece "How Kid Brady Broke Training", Kid Brady, after reading a magazine, goes off meat and starts an all-fruit diet under the belief that it will make him a better fighter. He later meets the article's author, who tells him that it was meant as satire, "[b]ut so subtle and delicate is my humor that apparently the thing is misleading".
The South Park episode "The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs" has this happen: Upon finding out that The Catcher in the Rye is overhyped, the kids write an offensive story about nothing in particular, solely to be more offensive than The Catcher in the Rye was claimed to be. The adults find it, and believe that it's a great literary work, even after the kids explicitly tell them that it is nothing more than a string of gross-out attempts on paper, and that there is no actual story in it.
In The Nostalgia Critic's review of Scooby Doo, his younger self defends the movie by claiming that it's making fun of the show's pointless celebrity cameos. The Critic responds that no, the movie just has pointless celebrity cameos.
A common problem on blogs like "White Whine" and other collections of First World Problems — for every entry that is a genuine example of someone engaging in over-the-top and unnecessary complaining about a trivial issue, there is another which is clearly either a parody of that type of person or someone who is perfectly aware that their current issues are trivial but are simply exaggerating for humourous effect or to vent.
An episode of The Simpsons has Marge finding a copy of The Onion on her neighbor's coffee table. Upon reading it, Marge is surprised at the headlines only to be informed that it's satire. Next, Marge opens the paper and upon reading the movie reviews, laughs at what the critics say about the movies only to find out the movie reviews are real.
A passage in What Th—?, Marvel's parody comic, has a hypothetical story in which the Fantastic Four meet Superman. The writer of the story comments in a footnote that it is impossible to write a parody of The Thing's dialogue that doesn't sound exactly like something he would really say.
An episode of Murphy Brown had Murphy passing off a painting her infant Avery had created, with the fake name of "A. Very". One critic thought it was brilliant. The other thought it was child scribblings. An art buyer bought it for an obscene amount because the two critics were arguing over it.
◊ declaring polio vaccine, water treatment, and psychology to be communist plots to destroy America a real pamphlet, or a parody of fervent 1950s "Red scare" tactics? (Answer: it's real!)
the trope namers, Rational Wiki, Poe's Law was formulated by Nathan Poe, referring to the Flame Wars on Christian forums where Creationism vs. Evolution was discussed: Many users posted parody comments, which were followed by both angry replies and supportive ones. Poe phrased his law thus: "Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake it for the genuine article."
While Poe's Law referred originally to religious fundamentalists it can also equally apply to rigid atheism, dogmatic socialism or communism, excessive capitalism, extreme environmentalism, crazy feminism, or indeed, absolutely any other debate where controversy runs high and at least one position is particularly extreme, such as the infamous North Korean Twitter feed that got mistaken for the real thing.
It can also refer to the idea (supported by a different Poe) that a poem should be short enough that the reader's mind does not wander, but that's something else entirely.
A similar notion was named "The Harry Golden
