parody

Parody is a human-made creative technique by which an authored work imitates a specific source work, style, or genre through deliberate exaggeration, distortion, or incongruity. Parameters: (1) a source or model — a particular work, authorial style, or genre whose conventions the work must be recognizable against; (2) a systematic imitation of that model's form or manner; (3) a deliberate deviation — exaggeration, distortion, or incongruity — that marks the work as play on the model rather than reproduction of it; (4) audience recognition of the source, the effect being organized around that recognition. Boundaries: (1) against satire — satire is organized around criticism of a target (person, institution, practice) and may employ parody among its tools, but the category requires the imitation-and-deviation structure itself, so a work that criticizes without imitating a model is not here; (2) against pastiche — pastiche imitates a style without deliberate deviation or commentary, so the line is drawn by whether the imitation is strained toward incongruity; (3) against caricature — caricature exaggerates the features of one particular subject in a single representation, while the category runs over authored works imitating an entire model's manner. Persistence: the technique persists through the literary and critical tradition — from Greek parodeia and Aristophanic travesty through the eighteenth-century mock-heroic to the modern critical vocabulary separating parody from satire — and through the practice of performance, text, film, and digital reproduction in which parodic works circulate as authored acts with identifiable sources. [formal: parodia | substrate: behavior | horizon: generations | explicit: yes | epoch: 0.01]