Spoofed with Their Own Words

Parodies normally exaggerate source material. Occasionally they don't — they repeat the original's exact words to show just how absurd they really sound. The quote, inserted in a parody context, often sounds as ridiculous or funny as the surrounding parody dialog.

This is commonly seen in Stealth Parody, in which case it may lead to Poe's Law. See also "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer, for when the work explicitly states that it's not exaggerating the original. If the work mistakenly quotes the original, it's Redundant Parody. Compare Review Ironic Echo.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Dragon Ball Z's early English dubs would be mocked quite a bit this way by the Abridged series:
  • One of the earlier episodes has Raditz tearing off Piccolo's arm, followed by the mocking line "Has anyone seen my arm? You can't miss it, it's green!" This line is present verbatim in pretty much every parody, rewrite or Abridged Series of DBZ.
  • Piccolo's "I can win! I feel great!" speech made it, unaltered, into the abridged series. The only difference was having Nail voice in at the end.
  • Recoome's pithy pre-combat taunt of "The name's Recoome, it rhymes with doom and you'll be hurting all too soon" was also imported verbatim into the abridged series. Unlike the other two, it changed context quite a bit, becoming the character's catchphrase and part of his Professional Wrestling persona.
  • Jumping back to the first part of the series, Nappa destroys some news vehicles, prompting a reporter to shout "Oh my God, he blew up the cargo robot!" However, the TFS version has him follow up with "...and the cargo was people!"
• Sailor Moon Abridged often reused cheesy-sounding lines from the '90s North American dub. A notification on the bottom of the screen tells viewers when they did this.
• Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure Abridged does the same "ACTUAL DUB LINE" thing as many other abridged series. However, on a subtler level, many scenes in the series are played out nearly verbatim in JJBA Abridged - JJBA is so crazy that it effectively parodies itself.
• Sword Art Online Abridged:
  • One episode riffs on Lisbeth's dub line about the Elucidator being the "gnarliest sword you can get from a monster drop":
    Kirito: Did you just say "gnarliest"?
  • Episode 11 has Abridged Kirito, somewhat melodramatically, repeat Canon Kirito's request that Kayaba prevent Asuna from killing herself should he manage to lose their duel:
    Asuna: You think I would kill myself over you?! Oh, go suck a dick!
  • Also in episode 11, there's a moment during the final conversation between the heroes and Kayaba when they ask him why he turned Sword Art Online into a death game. He initially states his canon motive, only to laugh that off and admit that he actually did it because he was heavily sleep-deprived and thought the Game-Breaking Bug that made Sword Art Online The Most Dangerous Video Game would give it bad reviews on Metacritic, and his best idea was to pretend it was all part of his master plan.
    Kayaba: Heheh, you know, it's funny. I don't even remember anymore...
    Viewers (Er, Kirito): ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS?!
    Kayaba: Hahahaha, oh my God, no! Could you imagine, two years and that's what I give you?! Man, that'd be unsatisfying!

Comic Books

• The MAD parody of the first X-Men movie put Storm's infamous "Do you know what happens to a toad when it's struck by lightning?" question in italics and quotes to indicate that it's from the actual movie. Toad then replies that he doesn't, but he now knows that "Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?" is no longer the stupidest question asked in a comic book movie.

Comic Strips

• A stealth form appears in the Dilbert spinoff book Clues for the Clueless: Dogbert's Big Book of Manners, which claims that other etiquette books waste space on "such useful tidbits as what kind of uniform the upstairs servants should wear, or the proper way to address the Pope when you meet him in person." These are actual topics addressed in Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, albeit in a tongue-in-cheek trivia section called "Answers to Questions Nobody Asked."

Fan Works

• LittleKuriboh made a video parodying the abridger "Chicknwings" with the character Turkey Legs and his abridged Dragon Ball Z episode. It's almost an exact copy of the original video, just with the voice slightly exaggerated. And of course he does it a few times in Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series by including "Actual 4Kids dialogue". Examples include:
  Tristan: In another few hours, the sun will rise!
  Bakura: Check his pulse, Yugi!
  Mokuba: What a digital dummy! The robot gave Seto a huge lead!

Films — Live-Action

• Airplane! is largely word-for-word quoted directly from the film Zero Hour! (1957), but with the serious deadpan delivery taking place in absurd surroundings. Reportedly, the line "We need to find someone who can not only fly this plane, but who didn't have fish for dinner!" was what convinced the writers that it had the makings of a comedy classic.
• Accidental example: Every time Senator Joseph McCarthy appears in Good Night, and Good Luck., it's actually the real Senator Joseph McCarthy speaking, courtesy of Stock Footage taken during the actual events. It can be hard to take his "portrayal" seriously, to the point that several critics who were unaware that the film used stock footage took the "actor" who was "playing" McCarthy to task for Chewing the Scenery.
• What Could Have Been: Trey Parker and Matt Stone were going to make a scene-by-scene recreation of The Day After Tomorrow, except with puppets, the idea being that this would help emphasize how stupid the movie is. Their lawyers advised against it, however, and they wound up making Team America: World Police instead.
• Fahrenheit 9/11: In the final scene, Moore mocks President George W. Bush by quoting his own words from an old press conference:
  Bush: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, can't get fooled again.
  Moore: For once, we agreed.

Live-Action TV

• Mystery Science Theater 3000 does this a few times.
  • For "Pod People", two of the host segments consist of re-enacting some of the film's most bizarre scenes almost verbatim.
  • For The Phantom Planet, they poke fun at Ray Makonnen's out-of-nowhere Contemplate Our Navels monologue ("You know, Captain, every year of my life, I grow more and more convinced that the wisest and best is to fix our attention on the good and the beautiful... if you just take the time to look at it.") by reciting the entire thing later, multiple times.
  • For Track of the Moon Beast, the bots re-enacted a part of the movie in which some people play a weird, elaborate, ineffective prank on an archeologist, then spend several minutes explaining it and apologizing for it. It's almost a word-for-word re-enactment.
  • This is usually the purpose of The Stinger in most episodes: a few seconds of the film that are bizarre or stupid enough that they don't need riffing.
• Saturday Night Live had a famous 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 Tina Fey's delivery were all it took.
  • They also used this trope in a Weekend Update parodying Jimmy McMillan, leader of the Rent Is Too Damn High Party.
• The Daily Show does this all the time. Interviewing John Stewart, Rachel Maddow even claimed to see little difference between his method of parodying events and her own of humorously reporting on them.
  • A special (and rather serious) mention goes to their comparison of FOX's coverage of the Ferguson tragedy to FOX's coverage of Benghazi. 10 minutes of repeating FOX's own demands of how the media should respond to Ferguson, repeated back at them for how they should respond to Benghazi.
• Speaking of Rachel Maddow, she occasionally stages "debates" using clips of what a politician is saying today on one side and what the same politician was saying a few years (or months, or sometimes days) ago on the other.
• Whenever Israeli satirical news panel show Gav Hauma features respected film and theater actor Lior Ashkenazi, there's a good chance he'll be called upon to recite some particularly ridiculous social media post by a politician, which he would do word for word, but in a ridiculously melodramatic and emphasized way (sometimes with background music to match). And it's hiladious.
• The Weekly with Charlie Pickering: When covering Donald Trump's combination Bible-and-founding-documents-of-the-USA, Charlie notes that normally, this would be the point where the show plays a parody commercial for it... but they don't have to, because the official commercial is ridiculous enough. They then play it unaltered.

Music

• "Weird Al" Yankovic:
  • He usually thinks up silly imagery to put into his song parodies, but in "Perform this Way" most of the lyrics mention things Lady Gaga has actually done, like being born out of an egg on stage.
  • In his live concerts, Al will fill time during costume changes (it presumably takes a bit to get into that fat suit for "Fat") by playing celebrity "interviews" in which he takes clips from actual interviews and puts himself in the part of the interviewer. While most of the humor comes from taking statements wildly out of context by changing the question, some statements would be wildly self-absorbed and navel-gazey no matter what the question.
  • Weird Al parodies often lift one or two lines verbatim from the original song, usually to put a humorous spin on it.
• The rant at the beginning of The Doors song "The Soft Parade" has Morrison speaking thusly:
  When I was back there in seminary school
  There was a person there
  Who put forth the proposition
  That you can petition the Lord with prayer
  Petition the Lord with prayer
  Petition the Lord with prayer
  You cannot petition the Lord with prayer!
  • The line "petition the Lord with prayer" sounded like a mockery of that proposition, the way it was said.
• Jon Daily and Cyrus Ghahremani's Red Hot Chili Peppers spoof "Abracadabralifornia" is mainly a style parody of their singles from Californication onward... But the bridge, with its lyrics "she jabbed my butt with a big stick / and then proceeded to be sucking my dick", seems to be targeting their earlier, raunchier material... and in fact that's just a slight paraphrasing of the Blood Sugar Sex Magik album track "Sir Psycho Sexy", where one verse graphically describes a sexual encounter with a police officer ^note the exact lines in "Sir Psycho Sexy" are "She stuck my butt with her big black stick /I said 'What's up? Now suck my dick'".

Video Games

• In I Wanna Be the Guy, you eventually fight Dracula from the Castlevania series. The bombastic dialogue between him and The Kid is taken directly from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, albeit with the Kid speaking Richter Belmont's lines in a squeaky voice.

Web Animation

• Zero Punctuation's review of Medal of Honor: Warfighter opens with Yahtzee stating that normally, he makes fun of a game by increasingly altering the title through the review until it gradually becomes ridiculous. In this case, he says that he can't do that because there's nothing more silly than simply using its actual name.
• FreedomToons: In this video, Seamus simply provides animation for a rambling Joe biden quote about 1.2 billion something and stacking spaghetti sauce.

Web Comics

• Darths & Droids: The dialogue when Jim/Han attempts (badly) to bluff an Imperial officer is taken word-for-word from the actual scene in A New Hope. Ironically, the lousy bluff actually makes more sense in the parody, as Jim is playing Han as an Idiot Hero.
• Jesus and Mo will often quote something recently said by a real-life religious apologist, putting their words into the mouths of the title characters. The original article is generally linked to in the commentary, with the writer listed as "guest scriptwriter".
• Final Fantasy VII: The Sevening loves doing this with the strange dialogue and the poor translations.
• Monster of the Week: The Complete Cartoon X-Files and Planet of Hats: The Complete Cartoon Star Trek both sometimes decide that nothing they have to say about an episode is funnier than the genuine dialogue.

Web Original

• The Editing Room will sometimes include actual lines of dialogue or describe a scene that actually happened in the movie, usually including (actual line of dialogue) or THIS HAPPENS.
• Some of the parodies featured on Platypus Comix simply highlight moronic things that famous people performed in real life. (eg, Some of the answers Far East Movement gives in this fake interview got lifted from a real article, although Peter Paltridge also included some fabricated responses.)
• This The Twilight Saga parody, in Chapter 14:
  EDWARD: I didn't eat you! Yay! Let's go now.
  BELLA: Okay but I'm driving.
  EDWARD: Friends don't let friends drive drunk. You're intoxicated by my presence.
  THAT LINE RIGHT THERE: *is an actual honest-to-God direct quote what the hell*
• Seanbaby's Cracked article, "6 Super Friends Villains That Didn't Give a @#%*", featured this as a category when doing his ever-popular mockery of Superfriends: "Best Actual Quote."
  Superman: Our computers show this is a giant strand of hair!
  Apache Chief: And that's what's blocking the sun's rays?
• There used to be a site called Society of Christians for the Restoration of Old Testament Morality, which was a Stealth Parody of people who cited the Bible to back up their political positions. It promoted ridiculous or outrageous positions, which it "justified" by quoting Bible verses correctly and in context.

Web Videos

• This happens as well with the editors/producers of Channel Awesome or similar review sites. Often music is added or a sound effect to emphasize the awkward situation. Though sometimes the films themselves are oddly edited prompting a "No, I didn't add anything."
  • The Nostalgia Critic, in particular, will typically add one of the more Narmful lines from the film to the end of the review.
  • In his review of Pixels, unable to use footage from the movie as it hasn't been released on home video yet, he re-enacts scenes from the movie with his own actors. The Kevin-James-as-U.S.-President character is played by an actor impersonating Barack Obama, to highlight how unbelievable it is for a U.S. President to say or do any of the things the Kevin James character does in the film.
  • While possibly a Parody Retcon, Rob mocked people on The Lorax (2012) commentary for "not getting" that the review having straw character execs while complaining about the movie having the same was intentional.
  • Brows Held High had, after Kyle said The Doom Generation showed the worst traits of The '90s, '90s Kid shows up and rants about the finer aspects of the movie - while a disclaimer reveals his words were actually part of the film's marketing!
• Cleolinda Jones does this in a few of her Movies in Fifteen Minutes posts, particularly The Happening, with a scene where a scientist declares that what happened may be an act of God that they'll never fully understand. Her Twilight summaries also include a lot of lines and phrases she found hilarious, like "outrageous flavor" and "furious kitten".
• Sometimes, CinemaSins will not even explain why a given scene is classified as a sin, just play it and have the narrator sigh as the sin count goes up.
• Blue Laser in Cheat Commandos is a fairly obvious parody of COBRA in G.I. Joe - and though several of their plots are clearly made up, their first appearance had them attempting to "blow up the ocean." It sounds totally in line with most Blue Laser plans, but it's ripped straight from an actual episode where COBRA got their hands on a formula that could turn bodies of water into explosives.
• One of Super Deluxe's videos spoofed Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign and its attempts to appeal to younger voters. Among a constant onslaught of meme-dropping is "Pokémon GO to the polls," an actual quote from Hillary during her campaign, along with dabbing and emojis (which she's also referenced).
• This video makes fun of how vague RWBY's magic system is by showing the clip where Weiss says "there's no such thing as Magic" then showing every time someone used their semblance, made funnier where at the end where they Nora's reaction to Raven turning into a bird "They, really are Magic"
• Backstroke of the West is a Gag Dub based word-for-word on the subtitles of a real Translation Train Wreck Chinese bootleg of Revenge of the Sith, with much of the humor being derived from the voice actors' completely straight-faced delivery of the ridiculous Word Salad dialogue.
• Max0r:
  • Most of the dialogue in "An Incorrect Summary of Ace Combat Zero" is replaced with a Gag Dub, but certain lines from the original game such as Pixy being asked whether he's slowing down due to a mechanical issue following the Hoffnung bombing and responding "I'm just sad", or PJ announcing he's going to propose to his girlfriend now that the war's over seconds before he's shot down make it in verbatim, complete with an "ACTUAL IN-GAME DIALOGUE" disclaimer.
  • He does the same thing in "An Incorrect Summary of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater", with regards to the line "You are above even the Boss. I hereby award you the title of Big Boss."
  • A lot of one-liners in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance similarly prove almost impossible to parody, with lines like "Don't fuck with this Senator!" (followed by him punting Raiden like a football and provoking an inexplicable crowd-cheer in the background) being entirely in-place with the stuff Max0r was making up.
• In July 2022, the official British Labour Party Twitter feed ran a video of clips from the Conservative leadership debate, with them all talking about the stuff they wanted to fix, or criticising what the others had done, with the point that this is apparently what senior Tories think about the twelve years they've been in power.
• A Running Gag on Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series consists of quoting particularly silly lines of dialogue word for word from the original 4Kids Entertainment dub of Yu-Gi-Oh!, complete with an "Actual 4Kids dialogue" caption.

Western Animation

• The Simpsons episode "Radio Bart" features the Superstar Celebrity Microphone, which is a parody of the now oft-forgotten Mr. Microphone. The ad for it features a direct lift from the original commercials for Mr. Microphone: that being, a guy driving by in his car and saying "Hey, good-looking, we'll be back to pick you up later!"

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