Greek song-beside-song still powers every modern spoof
Parody imitates a work, person, or style to comment or mock. Aristotle credited Hegemon of Thasos with twisting famous poems from sublime to silly; the Greek roots mean song set beside or against. Between pastiche and burlesque, it still invents new forms by laughing at old ones.
Simon Dentith calls parody a polemical allusive imitation of cultural forms. John Gross places it between pastiche—manner without satire—and burlesque that drags high material low; Diderot's Encyclopédie praised good parody as amusement that can instruct. English first cites Ben Jonson's 1598 Every Man in His Humour, then Dryden in 1693. Cousins include satire (attacks real-world vices), travesty (harsher transformation), pastiche (blank imitation without joke, in Fredric Jameson's phrase), skit, and burlesque anti-heroic drama. A spoof usually targets a whole genre's clichés rather than one text.
Greek Old Comedy could mock gods: Aristophanes' Frogs makes Heracles a glutton and Dionysus a cowardly theater tourist. Satyr plays lampooned tragedy. Philosophers used spoudaiogeloion; Timon of Phlius's Silloi needled living and dead thinkers, a Cynic habit shared by Menippus. In the second century CE, Lucian's ironically titled True History inflated travel lies into Moon voyages and interplanetary war, sometimes called early science fiction. Classical musicians once meant parody as serious reworking—motet into keyboard piece, or parody masses quoting other vocal works by Victoria, Palestrina, or Lassus—before the word drifted toward comic lift.
Twentieth-century modernists and postmodernists treated parody as a central engine of innovation; Russian formalists saw it freeing artists from background texts. China's 1910s–1920s entertainment market, Christopher Rea notes, parodied speeches, petitions, sutras, even a eulogy for a chamber pot. Borges's 1939 Pierre Menard story is often read as ultimate Quixote parody and a postmodern forecast. Across literature, music, theater, film, animation, and games, the device still works because audiences must recognize the original for the joke—or the homage—to land.
Source: Parody
