Parodies in my opinion can be some of the funniest comedic pieces of media, many of my favourite comedy-related films, shows or skits are parodies. I think playing around in a space where comedy doesn’t usually reside leads to greater creative output, in general, I find a lot of parodies to be surprisingly creative and technically impressive. One of my favourite comedy films ‘Popstar – Never Stop Never Stopping’ is filmed almost identically to other singer documentaries, even having multiple full-length songs with real celebrities on them. Another aspect of parodies that I think makes them stand out from other comedic forms is the ability to by-step copyright laws, seeing shows such as Family Guy being able to legally use Marvel or Star Wars characters while the MCU itself can barely get the rights to use spider-man is almost a parody in of itself.

The Reading ‘Parody Sketches’ by Joe Toplyn points out probably the biggest drawback in parodying, the fact that for a parody to be widely successful, as if the viewer has no idea what the parody is of it pretty much loses all humour, which also makes it harder to share parodies with people as they might just stare at something you find hilarious with a blank face.

My group media artifact was a parody of the news, which is probably the easiest form of media to parody as everyone knows what the conventions of the news are. We tried to best emulate a generic news channel as much as we could and we wanted to rely on sight gags more than just written ones. Overall I think we did a pretty good job in parodying the news despite the low-hanging nature of making fun of the news.

I was already pretty familiar with parodies so I didn’t learn too much, the most important thing that was hammered home a bit more this week though was the importance of emulating the media from your parodying as much as possible, as the higher effort to look serious before revealing the comedy lends itself to a higher degree of humour in my opinion.