Dark Parody

Lots of works, especially if they're very popular or unpopular, have parodies. Parodies are meant to be a joke, but some people have a dark sense of humour, and that's when the Dark Parody comes in.

Quite often, the work being parodied is very upbeat and they make it dark for absurdist humour. There are a lot of typical ways writers could make a parody dark:

• If the characters do something that would be dangerous in real life, such as climbing on buildings, the parody might have a character get hurt or die as a result of doing it.
• If two characters are in a romantic relationship, often an official couple, the parody might have them break up or turn one into an abusive partner or adulterer, or both.
• If a character is very cute and/or virtuous, the creator might kill that character off or rewrite him/her as evil. Stock ways of rewriting characters as evil include turning them into mass murderers, having a pet turn out to be sapient and evil, and making them prejudiced (antisemitism is a common one due to the association with Adolf Hitler). Also, characters who are antagonists but not all bad (such as the Hero Antagonist, Anti-Villain, or Harmless Villain) will be made more evil.
• Any character who acts high without actually doing drugs will be turned into a real druggie.
• If a character is eccentric, s/he'll be rewritten as actually insane, sometimes Ax-Crazy. Similarly, if someone is a pessimist or cries easily, the parody might show him with full-blown depression, and if a character scares easily, it might show him/her with an actual anxiety disorder.
• If there's an unlucky character, the parody might have that character either "snap" and turn evil due to frustration or be even unluckier than in canon.
• Other things that happen a lot in dark parodies include a character mistakenly thinking nothing bad is happening and goofy characters continuing to act goofy even when serious things happen.

See also Dark Fic, which can overlap with this trope if it's a Parody Fic. For dark things that happen in the work itself, see Cerebus Syndrome, Darker and Edgier, and Unexpectedly Dark Episode. Also see Subverted Kids' Show, which is a dark parody of a whole genre, and Corrupted Character Copy for cases where a character darkly parodies another. Compare Fractured Fairy Tale, although do note that the original versions of some fairy tales were pretty dark and not all Fractured Fairy Tales are dark.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Magical Witch Punie Chan: While the show seems to be a run-of-the-mill Magical Girl show, it turns out to be a Black Comedy take on the genre. The eponymous "heroine" is a Villain Protagonist who revels in beating up anyone who stands in her way (not just through magic but by literally wrestling them into submission), the Magical Land the she hails from is a Crapsaccharine World run by her Evil Queen of a mother, the Dark Magical Girl turns out to be the daughter of the previous ruling family whom the protagonist's family usurped via a smear campaign, and the cutesy Mentor Mascot is in fact a gang leader and former black ops operative with quite the Vocal Dissonance. Oh, and the side characters are a gang of female Japanese Delinquents who look like they came straight out of Fist of the North Star.
• Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt: The show is very vulgar and a lot of the jokes are made to cross as many lines as possible while referencing a lot of Western media which include high school movies, Transformers, Ghostbusters (1984), MTV songs, Saving Private Ryan, Romeo and Juliet with the artsyle looking like The Powerpuff Girls.

Comic Books

• Brat Pack is a vicious Take That! towards Young Allies and the Silver Age Teen Titans in which the Robin analogue is molested by the Batman Parody, the Wonder Girl analogue is a promiscuous airhead, the Speedy analogue is a drug addict, and the Bucky Barnes analogue is a racist steroid-abuser. And their mentors are all horrible degenerates who regularly abuse them and intend to kill them just so they won't have to share royalties once they turn 18.
• Cinema Purgatorio has a retelling of It's a Wonderful Life in which George Bailey is nearly killed by a series of accidents - only to find himself unharmed, the fatal experiences being endured by people who look only somewhat like him. Eventually, he's approached by a stuntman in place of Clarence; he explains that they're in a movie and that for every fatal incident he experiences, a stunt double has to endure it for the sake of the scene. Unfortunately, far from teaching him to respect the rights of the poor stunt doubles who suffer in his stead, this lecture teaches Bailey that he is effectively immortal, and he uses this new power to turn the tables on Mr Potter, kill him and take over the town - at the cost of yet another stuntman being shot down by Potter's bodyguards. At the end, George is keeping Mr Potter's severed head impaled on a paper spike as a memento.

Fan Works

• Anger Management: Lucy says, "Cross my heart and hope to die, as crimson tears flow from my eyes" (downplayed though, since the original poem still involves injuries and hoping to die).
• Dark Simpsons does this to The Simpsons, but in what ways varies between comics/videos. Either there is a Surprisingly Realistic Outcome to a particular throwaway gag, or a happy, friendly character is recharacterized as a murderer or a rapist (or even just suicidally depressed).
• Day of the Barney Trilogy, a genocide-themed parody of a lighthearted series.

Films — Animation

• In Bee Movie, when the bees are locking up the bears because bears kill bees, one of them is Winnie the Pooh.
• With a heavy emphasis on dark, the first segment of Where the Dead Go to Die, "Tainted Milk", was intended to be a Black Comedy parody of Lassie, with the Lassie parody being...outright demonic in nature. However, when it turned out to actually terrify viewers, the rest of the film was made as a straight horror flick.

Literature

• Downplayed for Goldilocks And The Three Dinosaurs. It's still a lighthearted story, but the dinosaurs want to eat Goldilocks, as opposed to the bears from The Three Bears, who are presumably innocent.
• Downplayed for the Goldilocks parody Mouldilocks and the Three Scares: Yes, she's a zombie now and the bears are now a family of freakish creatures, but they're still harmless.
• Mr Wolfs Pancakes takes characters from Little Red Riding Hood, Wee Willy Winkie, The Three Little Pigs, and the already-kinda-dark Chicken Little and The Gingerbread Man and puts them into a darker version of the plot of The Little Red Hen: Mr. Wolf wants to make some pancakes, but his neighbours (the other mentioned characters) refuse and are rude, so he eats them.
• Revolting Rhymes is a collection of fairy tale parodies. As the title suggests, most of them are dark:
  • In the one for Cinderella, the prince decapitates the stepsisters, so Cinderella marries a jam maker instead.
  • In the one about Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack's mother is abusive and the giant eats her.
  • In the parody of The Three Little Pigs, the pigs get killed by Red Riding Hood, who turns out to be even more evil than the wolf.
• Zombie McCrombie from an Overturned Kombi is a parody of Hairy Mc Clairy where all the dogs are zombies.
• Warhammer 40,000: One of the Ciaphas Cain novels mentions a children's song called "The Tracks on the Land Raider". Fans figure it is based on "The Wheels on the Bus", and some have supplied lyrics.
• The Addicted Animals book series is an adult-themed parody of the If You Give... series of children's books meant to teach readers the dangers of addictive substances like alcohol, cannabis, and meth in the same style and with a similar formula as those books.

Live-Action TV

• In The Addams Family, there's an in-universe example: Wednesday Addams writes a version of Little Red Riding Hood where Red Riding Hood dies.
• Saturday Night Live:
  • The "You're A Champion, Charlie Brown" sketch from the Season 24 episode hosted by Brendan Fraser gives a realistic and depressing spin on the old "Lucy pulls the football away from Charlie Brown" gag, in that Charlie Brown's typical fall on his back causes a fatal head injury and all that Lucy, Linus, and Franklin can do is despair and yell at Lucy that this is her fault.
  • The "Clark Kent" sketch from Season 25 hosted by Dwayne Johnson presented Superman as someone so incompetent in general, but more specifically at doing his signature Clark Kenting that everybody else in the Daily Planet was utterly sick of having him around and ended up convincing him to kill a person (by accident in Superman's case, but still) by pretending that said person was a super-villain, so Superman would end up in jail and they wouldn't have to deal with him ever again.
  • A classic Chris Farley sketch parodies the "switcheroo" advertisement used in brands like Folger's. Normally, the people who get told that they had their order switched would either be delighted or would be angry and would ask to not be used in the ad. Farley's character instead has a meltdown and beats up the waiter who informed him about the switched order before he starts escalating his rage to attacking everyone else at the restaurant, prompting other people there to restrain him before anyone gets killed by his wrath.
• An in-universe example in Star Trek: Voyager. The doctor sings a version of "Rock-a-Bye Baby" and changes it from the baby's cradle falling out of a tree (already kind of dark) to a shuttle the baby was on exploding.
  Seven of Nine: "Are you trying to soothe the baby to sleep or traumatise her?"
• The Boys (2019) plays up the Black Comedy side of the original comic book (a Deconstructor Fleet for superheroes and the comic book industry) to prevent it from turning too grim, and becomes this in the process.
• Strangers with Candy parodies 1970s Afterschool Specials and anti-drug PSAs. Its protagonist, Jerri Blank, was inspired by Florrie Fisher, a former socialite turned motivational speaker that visited high schools in the 1960s and early 1970s to talk about her fall from socialite to heroin-addled prostitute in the 1940s. Many lines from the show are taken directly from a talk Fisher gave at a New York high school, including "I was a boozer, a user and a loser.".

Music

• One popular parody of "Joy to the World" involves schoolchildren celebrating their teacher's death, lighting her head on fire, and flushing the rest of her down the toilet until it clogs. Other variations have them celebrating the school burning down, or swapping out the teacher with the principal or Barney.
• Okilly Dokilly is a heavy metal band where the members dress as Ned Flanders from The Simpsons and act out gory scenes. The Simpsons is no stranger to dark humour, but Ned Flanders is a very polite, friendly guy.
• "Laverne and Shirley Lose Everything in a Catastrophic Fire" is a parody of the Laverne & Shirley theme song with lyrics such as "Every dream we had cannot come true" and "There is nowhere for us to go now."
• One parody of "Jingle Bells" involves Santa dying.
• In this so-called Literal Music Video for "Something There" from Beauty and the Beast, everybody is trying to murder one another.
• Koit did a dark parody of "Heads, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes" by revealing at the end that the body parts were severed and kept in jars by a deranged Serial Killer collecting them.
• Songdrops:
  • "The Wheels on the Bus are Falling Off" is a parody of "The Wheels on the Bus", where the bus's wheels are falling off, there are zombies and "kind-of-mad" snakes on the bus, the engine is on fire, the children are all screaming, and nobody knows where the first aid kit is.
  • Several parodies in "The (Not Exactly) Nursery Rhyme Song":
    • In "Hickory Dickory Dock", the mouse puts the cat into a headlock.
    • In "Jack and Jill", Jill's father says, "Step away from my daughter!" to Jack.
    • In "Old Mother Hubbard", Mother Hubbard breaks three of her bones after slipping on a crack.
  • "The 13 Nights of Halloween" is a parody of "The 12 Days of Christmas" that involves witches sending the protagonist spooky things such as creepy dolls and ghosts.
• "Super Bad Transmittable Contagious Awful Virus!" by Daniel Matarazzo is a parody of "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" (of Mary Poppins) describing how awful the COVID-19 coronavirus is and to please keep social distancing.
• Horror Host John Zacherley did a morbid parody of "Gravy (For My Mashed Potatoes)" by Dee Dee Sharp called "Gravy (With Some Cyanide)", where he sang about his scheme of using poisoned gravy to kill his in-laws.

Video Games

• Eggs For Bart is a fanmade horror game based around The Simpsons that was inspired by and used lines said on Game Grumps.
• Homer The Flanders Killer is a fan-made game for The Simpsons about Homer killing the Flanders family with a gun including Rod and Todd.
• PETA has made a few parodies of popular video game franchises, taking an innocuous, family-friendly work and turning it into a gory story about animal abuse. Examples include Pokémon Black and Blue, where the Pokémon are abused and trying to escape from their cruel owners, Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals, where you play as Mama slaughtering a dead turkey, or Super Tanooki Skin 2D, where you play as the skinned Tanooki trying to get their pelt back from the evil Mario.

Web Animation

• This fan animation crossover between Dora the Explorer and The Loud House involves Swiper killing Leni.
• There were two Adobe Flash series made in Chile made at the beginning of the Turn of the Millennium:
  • Roberto Manfinfla is a Chilean Cult Classic Flash animation, but that lasted six episodes. The New Adventures of Roberto Manfinfla made in The New '10s introduced new characters, one of them is none less than Clarence as an adult, being a embittered fat guy with the face full of pimples who works in a fast-food restaurant as a cook.
  • The Migraine Boy animations made by MTV were parodied by a Chilean Adobe Flash, that used the MTV version as base and made it Bloodier and Gorier and with a lot of Vulgar Humor and local Cluster F-Bomb, becoming a success in Chile at the point of overpassing the original animation and becoming a Cult Classic years later.
• A majority of parodies made by Dorkly tend to rely heavily on Black Comedy. Among a few notable examples include one with Bowser shooting the guy who makes his guns to rant about the guns being big and slow, the Wall-Nut turning into a zombie after being bitten, and Princess Peach getting kidnapped by realistic kidnappers. That's not even getting started on their parodies that are series in and of themselves.
• Planet Dolan's nursery rhyme parodies are often dark:
  • Their parody for "Hickory Dickory Dock" involves spooky things such as green goo and ten thousand Krakens.
  • Their parody for "I'm a Little Teapot" involves the teapot turning its water corrosive unintentionally and accidentally injuring a dog and killing another teapot.
• The Transformingmorpher video "Amelia Bedelia Is Actually Pretty Terrifying" consists of a gruesome parody of Amelia Bedelia where the maid's tendency to interpret Mr. Rogers' statements in the literal sense escalates to disturbing levels, to the point that she makes an armchair from actual severed arms and Mr. Rogers quickly regrets using the word "brainstorm" after seeing Amelia Bedelia make bloody brains rain from the sky.
• Almost everything created by MeatCanyon. Really. Whether it's Pinocchio eating his creator to become a real boy, or Thomas the Tank Engine being a lovecraftian horror, or Dream being a bug-human hybrid kept secret by his father, MeatCanyon has a talent for making horror out of the least expected things.
• Flash-Gitz Animation can be summed up as making everything they touch Bloodier and Gorier —Rudolph's nose being an exploding tumor and Mario being a racist murderer are just some examples.

Web Comics

• Garfield Minus Garfield is a webcomic where Garfield strips are edited to remove the eponymous character, leaving Jon Arbuckle imagining he has the cat and making the same dialogs and reactions but alone. A dark and depressed version of the original one but Played for Laughs and even approved by Jim Davis, Garfield's creator nonetheless. And this gets exaggerated with Square Root of Minus Garfield.

Web Original

• The Reddit page /r/2meirl4meirl takes common memes and makes them extremely bitter and self-deprecating.
• "Hatsune Miku created X", a meme where a controvertial figure who created a popular property is Unpersoned and replaced by the much more beloved character, has two common dark parodies: either Miku is credited for heinous acts as well (ex: Jack the Ripper was controversial, so it was really Miku who killed all those prostitutes) or Miku develops a Cult of Personality that credits her with everything.

Web Videos

• A number of abridged series videos exaggerate or warp the character's personalities, often beyond recognition, for laughs.
  • 50% OFF is a parody of Free!. While the original anime does occasionally tackle dark topics, it remains a relatively optimistic anime about four friends forming a swimming club. Notable changes in the parody include giving the main character Split Personalities, turning the optimistic and cheerful Cloudcuckoolander onto a trash-talking Gayngster, and characterizing the Comically Serious new recruit as a Serial Killer.
  • Friendship is Witchcraft is a parody of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic where, among other changes, Twilight is a narcissistic sociopath who has a crush on her step-brother, Spike is a universally-hated Butt-Monkey, Fluttershy not-so-secretly leads an apocalyptic cult that worships "the Smooze", Pinkie Pie is a Stepford Smiler who was raised by "gypsies" after her parents died in a fire and who dabbles in the dark arts and sings upbeat songs with dark lyrics, and Sweetie Belle is a robot who doesn't know she's a robot and runs the risk of going crazy if she ever finds out.
• Lasagna Cat is a Garfield parody with a lot of Surreal Horror and dark mockery of the source material, which is acted out with a creepy-looking Garfield costume, and then mocked further in a weird skit. "Sex Survey Results" took it even farther, with the ending consisting of nightmarish imagery and the suffering of an older Jon Arbuckle/Jim Davis.
• Paint:
  • The "After Ever After" series, which pokes dark fun at Disney Animated Canon, as the characters sing about what happened "after" their films ended. The jokes often mirror modern-day issues, such as Simba's pride going extinct, and they're all sung to the tune of an actual Disney song: like, in The Lion King (1994)'s case, "I Just Can't Wait to Be King". Some of them instead discuss what happened during the time period the film is set.
  • In a collab with Peter Hollens, they created a "Boy Band" parody, poking fun at *NSYNC, One Direction, The Jonas Brothers and Backstreet Boys, changing the lyrics of their songs to make fun of what the bands went or were going through in real-life...ending on the light note of The Backstreet Boys' continuation as a band.

Western Animation

• Family Guy frequently makes dark parodies of movies, TV shows, etc., particularly during their cutaway gags. For example, "Meet the Quagmires" has a parody of the intro to The Jetsons where George and Jane end up arguing because she took too much money.
• Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law usually plays with this trope, showing classic Hanna-Barbera characters in a dark and twisted tone but Played for Laughs. One example is an episode where The Flintstones (and especially Fred) are shown as The Sopranos.
• Many of the parodies on Robot Chicken are dark:
  • In their parody of Wonder Pets!, the Wonder Pets accidentally take a calf to the slaughterhouse due to thinking it was a comedy club because the "S" was missing, so it read "laughterhouse".
  • In their parody of The Jetsons, George is killed, presumably by Rosie, and in another Jetsons parody, Elroy is killed by aliens.
  • In their parody of Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin is dangerously delusional, as he kills his parents and blames it on Hobbes, eventually ending up in an insane asylum.
  • In the parody of Happy Days, Ralph dies and Fonzie tries to resurrect him but turns him into a zombie instead. Ralph then turns Potsie and Richie into zombies and Richie tells Fonzie to kill him so he doesn't turn into one.
  • Their attempt at a Toy Story 4 trailer (released long before the real one was starting production at Disney) followed the same idea of Andy being grown up... the difference being that he became a junkie and used Buzz as a makeshift bong, causing so much damage to him that Woody is forced to give him a Mercy Kill.
  • They showcase a "realistic" epilogue to Revenge of the Nerds that has the whole cast of nerds arrested, sentenced for multiple crimes including sexual harassment and rape, and slaughtered in jail.
  • Two separate sketches showcase G.I. Joe as so utterly useless (Awesome, but Impractical at best) that they are utterly massacred by a single sniper and Taliban insurgents, respectively. The latter sketch also sees Cobra Commander and his inner circle completely slaughtered by SEAL Team Six, because the SEALs are, comparatively, a No-Nonsense Nemesis.
  • Another sketch poked fun at both their Hollywood Tactics and the franchise's gimmick of "all of the Joes have a code-name" by having the Joes giving a rookie an Embarrassing Nickname ("Fumbles"), and this rookie finding it so annoying that he quits the Joes and slaughtering them all in a sniper rampage, which the Joes cannot do anything about because they don't do the typical things the military would do if there's a sniper around, like ducking for cover.
  • Their skit parodying iCarly starts with Carly getting her nudes leaked online and ends with her father having a Heroic BSoD and nuking Iran.
  • The obligatory SpongeBob SquarePants short involves the Krusty Krab using fish meat as the secret ingredient, essentially turning everyone in Bikini Bottom into cannibals.
  • Their Homestar Runner parody had the government raid Free Country, USA due to mistaking Strong Badia as a separatist enclave. Several characters die in the ensuing chaos.
  • A sketch parodying Gullah Gullah Island has Binyah Binyah turn out to be a fugitive criminal who was wearing a tadpole costume and living with the Gullah family to hide from the cops, who end up forcing him to blow his cover when they find and threaten to shoot him.
  • A spoof of Curious George has George turn out to be a carrier for a lethal virus (with the first person infected by him being The Man in the Yellow Hat) and the city he's in being nuked to prevent the infection from spreading anywhere else.
• The Simpsons:
  • One TV show the children watch is called The Itchy & Scratchy Show, which is a parody of Tom and Jerry and Herman and Katnip that turns the cartoonish violence into actual violence, with Scratchy the cat dying gruesomely in every episode.
  • The episode "Fear of Flying" has a scene in which Homer, looking for a new bar to drink, enters Cheers. The whole cast is just a little bit more jerkish, with Norm getting the worst of it, being a hostile and barely-coherent drunk. For bonus points, several actual Cheers cast members provided the voices for their dark analogues!
  • Combined with Expy Coexistence, in the episode "Brother's Little Helper" a Facial Composite Failure of Bart's description instead creates a drawing of Dennis the Menace (US). Chief Quimby then mentions that the Dennis Mitchell drawing reminds him of "the kid who roughed up the Wilson widow".
  • One opening sequence of the annual Treehouse of Horror episode has the Simpsons standing in for The Munsters... who subsequently are all lynched by the people of Springfield because they are monsters. The only one who survives is Lisa, who is standing in for the Token Human member of the family, Marilyn.
• Teen Titans Go! is a Denser and Wackier spin-off of Teen Titans (2003) with a heavy reliance on Black Comedy and the main cast frequently depicted as far meaner and crueler than they were in the original show.
• The Venture Brothers
  • Their take on Hanna-Barbera classics like Jonny Quest and Scooby-Doo is absolutely merciless, the former by way of constantly deconstructing how living a life like Jonny's is highly traumatizing (even showing a grown-up Jonny at one point, who had turned into a nerve-wrecked drug addict) and the latter by having an Expy group show up who were quite visibly supposed to be the Scooby gang but also were composites with well-known scumbags of the Seventies like Patty Hearst (a kidnapped "Daphne" suffering from Stockholm syndrome), Valerie Solanas (a violent misandrist radical feminist lesbian "Velma"), David "the Son of Sam" Berkowitz (a "Shaggy" who is the only one who can "hear" what "Scooby" said) and Ted Bundy ("Freddy").
  • Rusty's father, Dr. Jonas Venture, is one to Doc Savage, an uber-macho world-traveling crimefighter and super-scientist, but Jonas was also an Abusive Parent and Manipulative Bastard.
  • The titular brothers are this to The Hardy Boys in that they're repeatedly shown as being Too Dumb to Live and very much in over their heads, and in fact have repeatedly died and subsequently cloned by their father.
  • The Impossibles are this to the Fantastic Four. Professor Richard Impossible (Mister Fantastic) is an abusive sexist who ultimately becomes a villain, Sally's (Invisible Woman) skin becomes invisible whenever she's not actively concentrating to keep it visible, Cody (Human Torch) flames on in contact from oxygen but can't turn them off and can feel the burns despite being impervious to them, and Ned (The Thing) is more like a giant callous than a giant rock.
  • "The Terminus Mandate" features Blind Rage, an egotistical jerkass Daredevil knockoff.
• Bambi Meets Godzilla. At least if you take it as a parody of Bambi, rather than of Godzilla.
• The New Adventures of the Wonder Twins consists of a send-up of Superfriends where the Wonder Twins Zan and Jayna, thanks to being completely incompetent as well as the series sharply averting Talking Is a Free Action, horribly screw up their attempts at rescuing people and the teens they try to save end up dying as a result.

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