Parody and Its Companions

 by Kirk Woodward

[Kirk Woodward’s latest contribution to Rick On Theater can be seen as a sort of companion piece to his “Max Beerbohm’s Theater Reviews,” which was posted on 2 November. 

[In that latter post, Kirk wrote some about Beerbohm’s parodies and even quoted from a few.  In “Parody and Its Companions,” the author begins by discussing Beerbohm’s parodies once again.  That opening, however, is just the lead-in for an examination of parody as a form of writing, a literary genre, if you will.

[Beerbohm, whose work essentially generated this post, would be (and likely is) the subject of an entire book on parody, but he’s too prolific for a short blog post, it turns out.  Also, as Kirk observes, “I wish I had more Beerbohm in [this post], but most of the parodies simply take too much to make their point.”  In other words, they’re too long to quote.

[That being the case, we’ll just have to muddle along with less of the master of parody and glean what we can from the rest of the field.  Take a gander, then, and enjoy.]

In a recent posting on this blog I described the writer and caricaturist Max Beerbohm (1872-1956) as a master of the art of parody (see “Max Beerbohm’s Theater Reviews,” posted on Rick On Theater on 2 November 2020). I thought it might be useful to say a little more about parody, including its close relations travesty and burlesque, focusing initially on its relation to theater.

The online dictionary Oxford Languages defines parody as “an imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist, or genre with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect." Parody is a form of humor.

It’s important to remember this fact when writers are upset at parodies of their work. The effect of parody resembles that of a great deal of standup comedy, for example of the sort late-night television hosts use in their opening monologues, as they imitate the speaking styles of politicians and spoof their policy positions.

The intention is to take a reality (a politician, a speech, or in literary parody a writing style) and use it as the basis for “humorous exaggeration.” The result may be affectionate or wounding – the latter is always a risk with humor, and of course some parodies are simply malicious.

The temptation to simply make this posting a series of quotations is almost overwhelming.

Max Beerbohm, as mentioned above, is definitely the master of parody, but the parodies in A Christmas Garland (1912) seldom make their points in briefly quotable form, although I did find a useful short passage of parody in my posting on Beerbohm (the target was Rudyard Kipling, 1865-1936), and I include another below.

There do not appear to have been many anthologies of parody published, and the most notable, to my knowledge, is out of print: Parodies: An Anthology from Chaucer to Beerbohm – and After by Dwight Macdonald (Random House, 1960). Macdonald’s book provides most of the examples I will quote here, as well as an excellent essay on parody in an appendix to the book.

In that essay Macdonald makes useful distinctions between travesty (“putting high, classic characters into prosaic situations”), burlesque (in which “the writer is concerned with the original not in itself but merely as a device for topical humor”), and parody (“making a new wine that tastes like the old but has a slightly lethal effect . . . at its best, it is a form of literary criticism”).

Looking at the use of parody in theater, we will find that travesty and burlesque (in Macdonald’s sense of the word, which has little to do with erotic stage shows) are parody’s companions, often working hand in hand with parody – they might be triplets. There is no firm dividing line between the three; parody is the most restrained, travesty the wildest, burlesque quite aggressive. In theater one uses the tools at hand, and all three tools are available.

An example of a travesty might be MacBird! (1967) by Barbara Garson (b. 1941), which used Shakespeare’s play Macbeth as a framework for mocking President Lyndon Johnson (1908-1973). An example of a burlesque might be the play The Rehearsal (1671), to which we will return. The fact that both these examples are plays points to the fact that parody can be at a minimum a niche element of theater.

Here are examples, many of them from Macdonald’s book.

Greek tragedy, at the beginning of Western drama, is a fertile field for parody because of its elevated language. The high seriousness of Greek tragedy always risks inadvertent laughter. The poet A. E. Housman (1859-1936), also a noted classical scholar, wrote a “Fragment of a Greek Tragedy” (first appeared, 1883; current text published, 1925) that begins

CHORUS: O suitable-attired-in-leather-boots
Head of a traveler, wherefore seeking whom
Whence by what way how purposed art thou come
To this well-nightingaled vicinity?
My object in inquiring is to know,
But if you happen to be deaf and dumb
And do not understand a word I say,
Then wave your hand, to signify as much. 

Housman’s parody points out the difficulty of translation: one might imagine that “well-nightingaled vicinity,” for example, might be a legitimate translation from some ancient Greek text, but what in the world can one do with it on stage?

This may also be the place to mention a closet drama, The Dynasts, by the novelist Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), clearly influenced by Greek drama, a play which Hardy described as "an epic-drama of the war with Napoleon, in three parts (1904, 1906, 1908), nineteen acts and one hundred and thirty scenes” (apparently actually one hundred and thirty one, but who’s counting), which you may never have seen performed, since it seems it never has been.

The scale of the work is overwhelming, and Max Beerbohm, in his parody “A Sequelula to ‘The Dynasts’” (1912), does his best to catch its grandiosity. Here is Beerbohm’s opening stage direction:

The Void is disclosed. Our own Solar System is visible, distant by some two million miles.

Enter the Ancient Spirit and Chorus of the Years, the Spirit and Chorus of the Pities, the Spirit Ironic, the Spirit Sinister, Rumors, Spirit-Messenger, and the Recording Angel.

Quite a crowd. In this piece Beerbohm also demonstrates the function of parody as literary criticism, for example when the Spirit Sinister asks who wrote The Dynasts, and the Recording Angel replies, in iambic pentameter:

                        Hardy, Mr. Thomas,
Novelist. Author of “The Woodlanders,”
“Far from the Madding Crowd,” “The Trumpet Major,
“Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” etcetera,
Etcetera. In 1895
“Jude the Obscure” was published, and a few
Hasty reviewers, having to supply
A column for the day of publication,
Filled out their space by saying that there were
Several passages that might have been
Omitted with advantage. Mr. Hardy
Saw that if that was so, well then, of course,
Obviously the only thing to do
Was to write no more novels, and forthwith
Applied himself to drama and to Us. 

Returning briefly to ancient Greek drama, Aristophanes (c. 446-c. 386 BC), the great Greek comic playwright, uses parody frequently in the eleven plays of his that we have texts for today. Stavros Tsitsidiris, in an essay called “On Aristophanic Parody: The Parodic Techniques” (2010), writes that

As any reader of Aristophanes’ plays can testify, the use of parody is not only an inexhaustible source of comicality, but also one of the main characteristics of the poet’s work. There is no Aristophanic comedy in which parody is not strongly present. Comparison with comic authors of other periods may prove useful in highlighting the difference. Thus, in Plautus’ and Terentius’ comedies we can detect parody, in some cases even paratragedy. Needless to say, parody is also used by Shakespeare and Molière, who occasionally parodies Corneille. Nevertheless, my impression is that parody is not as important or varied in the œuvre of any of these authors as it is in Aristophanes. 

Aristophanes’ great parodic target is the tragedian Euripides (c. 480 – c. 406 BC), who represented the “modern” movement in Greek tragedy, as opposed to the “classic” Aeschylus (c. 525/524 – c. 456/455 BC) and Sophocles (c. 497/6 – winter 406/5 BC).

Aristophanes parodies Euripides extensively in his comedy The Frogs (405 BC), which climaxes in a “write-off” between Euripides and Aeschylus to see which is the greater. It actually might be more accurate to say that Aristophanes writes travesties of Euripides’ verse – it’s hard to judge without knowing the originals in Greek. In The Frogs, the most grandiose verses by Euripides are both parodied and turned silly:

Be still! Attendants on the bee priestess
are nigh to open up Artemis’ shrine—BASH.
Why come you not to our assistance?
I have authority to utter out in full,
to speak those fatal orders ruling us
and this our expedition—BISH BASH.                                             
Why come you not to our assistance?

(Translation by Ian Johnston, 2008 and 2020. “BASH” represents a physical action, probably pounding on somebody’s head – the comedy is highly physical.)

Parody can be a way for writers to work through the impact of other authors’ work on their own, in the process of moving from imitation to an individual style. William Shakespeare (1564-1616) notably appears to do this.

Two examples illustrate his parodies of others’ work, one apparently in his early days as a writer, another looking back from his maturity. In Love’s Labour’s Lost (possibly written in the mid 1590’s), Shakespeare parodies the so-called Euphistic style of writing, which Macdonald describes as

an elaborate sentence structure based on antitheses and parallelisms (usually without worry about making sense), plays on words, alliteration, involved images, and highflown allusions from mythology and natural history.

 So, for example, from Love’s Labour’s Lost, the way to “win your love” is

to jig off a tune at the tongue’s end, canary to it with your feet, humor it with turning up your eyelids, sigh a note and sing a note, sometimes through the throat, as if you swallowed love by singing love, sometimes through the nose, as if you snuffed up love by smelling love; with your hat penthouse-like o’er the shop of your eyes; with your arms crossed on your thin belly-doublet like a rabbit on a spit; or your hands in your pocket like a man after the old painting; and keep not too long in one tune, but a snip and away. 

This may of course have been funnier to the Elizabethan audience than it is for us today.

Similarly, in Hamlet (1599-1601?) Shakespeare has an actor perform a speech which parodies the muscular poetic style of his early rival and inspiration Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593):

The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arm,
Black as his purpose, did the night resemble
When he lay couched in the ominous horse,
Hath now this dread and black complexion smear’d
With heraldry more dismal, head to foot
Now is he total gules; horribly trick’d
With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons,
Bak’d and impasted with the parching streets,
That lend a tyrannous and damned light
To their vile murders; roasted in wrath and fire,
And thus o’er-sized with coagulate gore,
With eyes like carbuncles, the hellish Pyrrhus
Old grandsire Priam seeks . . . 

I mentioned The Rehearsal earlier, and suggested that it might more properly be called burlesque, but it contains parody too and deserves to be mentioned because it is an example of a full play devoted to parody. It was written by George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham (1628-1687), with contributions by some of his friends, and it took shots at both the plays and the person of the poet and playwright John Dryden (1631-1700).

Dryden was Poet Laureate of England beginning in 1668, and then and now has been considered the leading writer of Restoration England (a period beginning in 1660 with King Charles II restored to the throne). However, he wrote tragedies in high style, ordinarily in rhymed couplets, and high style is easily parodied (or burlesqued).

 Macdonald gives the original of a passage from Dryden’s play The Conquest of Granada (c. 1669):             

So, two kind turtles, when a storm is nigh,
Look up and see it gathering in the sky.
Each calls his mate to shelter in the groves,
Leaving, in murmurs, their unfinished loves.
Perched on some dropping branch, they sit alone,
And coo and hearken to each other’s moan. 

In The Rehearsal this becomes:

So boar and sow, when any storm is nigh,
Snuff up and smell it gathering in the sky.
Boar beckons now to trot in chestnut groves
And there consummate their unfinished loves.
Pensive in mud they wallow all alone,
And snort and gruntle to each other’s moan.

Not all dramatic parody is on the stage. The reviewer Kenneth Tynan (1927-1980) supplied a remarkable parody of the play Our Town (1938) by Thornton Wilder (1897-1975), writing about a production of a theatrical version of the novel Requiem for a Nun by William Faulkner (1897-1962) that opened in London in 1957: 

Like I say, simple folk fussin’ and botherin’ over simple, eternal problems. Take this Temple Stevens, the one Mr. Faulkner’s been soundin’ off about. ‘Course, Mr. Faulkner don’t pretend to be a real play-writer, ‘n maybe that’s why he tells the whole story backwards, ‘n why he takes up so much time gabbin’ about people you never meet – and what’s more, ain’t going to meet. By the time he’s told you what happened before you got here, it’s getting’ to be time to go home.

One more example of parody in drama that Macdonald cites is a group of three short plays by Ring Lardner (1885-1933), which Macdonald notes “seem to be directed at expressionism, grand opera, the Moscow Art Theatre, and Eugene O’Neill.” They are in any case packed with non sequiturs. Here is for example a bit from Lardner’s short play “I Gaspiri (The Upholsterers)” (1924):

FIRST STRANGER: Where were you born?
SECOND STRANGER: Out of wedlock.
FIRST STRANTER: That’s mighty pretty country around there.
SECOND STRANGER: Are you married?
FIRST STRANGER: I don’t know. There’s a woman living with me, but I can’t place her. 

(Three outsiders named Klein go across the stage three times. They think they are in a public library. A woman’s cough is heard off-stage left.)

A NEW CHARACTER: Who is that cough?
TWO MOORS: That is my cousin. She died a little while ago in a haphazard way.
A GREEK: And what a woman she was!
 
(The curtain is lowered for seven days to denote the lapse of a week.) 

I have taken all the above examples from Macdonald’s book, and they can lead us to think a little more widely about parody in theater. Parody, and its siblings travesty and burlesque, are tools that can be widely used or specifically targeted.

As an example, Spamalot (2005), with book by Eric Idle (b. 1943) and score by John Du Prez (b. 1946), is in general a parody, travesty, and a burlesque of the legend of King Arthur, as was the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), on which it was based. Piling it on, within Spamalot is the song “The Song That Goes Like This,” a parody (particularly in the music) of big ballads composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber (b. 1948) for shows like The Phantom of the Opera (1986).

Spamalot, of course, was a Broadway show, but many more theatrical parodies (and travesties and burlesques) are staged off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway. “Niche” shows can more easily find a place there, and of course the same is true in smaller theaters across the country.

The longest running of parodies off-Broadway is Forbidden Broadway, created by Gerard Alessandrini (b. 1953), which opened in 1982 and ran, in that production, for 2,332 performances.  The total number of this and subsequent performances now numbers in five figures.

Forbidden Broadway has good company. An article by David Gordon on Theatermania.com (October 18, 2017) highlighted parodies of Hamilton as well as the TV shows Full House, Saved by the Bell, Bayside, and Friends, as well as Game of Thrones: The Rock Musical – An Unauthorized Parody.

All the parodies just mentioned are musicals, and musicals dominate stage parodies, certainly today. Perhaps the best known modern parodies of straight plays – if the word may be used in this connection – are those associated with the Theatre of the Ridiculous movement pioneered by Charles Ludlam (1943-1987), for example his highly camped up adaptation of Camille (1973).

Clearly the impulse for theatrical parody has not disappeared over the years. It turns up in film too, now and then, particularly in those directed by Mel Brooks (b. 1926), including Young Frankenstein (1974), parodying a long series of horror movies inspired by the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelly (1818); High Anxiety (1977), doing the same for the films of Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980); and Spaceballs (1987), tackling the first three Star Wars films.

A staple of film, as a matter of fact, is a scene or a shot that’s a tribute, an homage, or a nod to another director, and obviously these can be close to parody.

For example, the famous image of a baby carriage bouncing down the steps of a public building, first seen in the film Battleship Potemkin (1925) directed by Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) has been imitated, or parodied, with varying degrees of seriousness in films such as The Untouchables (1988), Ghostbusters 2 (1989), and The Naked Gun 33 1/3 (1994).

These may be enough examples to demonstrate that parody and its companions are flexible tools. What they have in common is that they are based on previous works of some kind, but they can respond to those works with admiration or scorn, humor or anger, seriousness or ludicrousness, as the situation demands.

Parodies also offer an audience a particular kind of satisfaction, the satisfaction of knowing that one knows what is being parodied. In this sense parody compliments its audience, although of course it may not be a compliment to the target. (A parody may also be so small or so sly that its creator is one of the few to realize exactly what it is. In that case, the satisfaction is primarily the creator’s.)

It seems likely that parody, travesty, and burlesque will always have a place in art as long as pieces can be exposed for their styles, their gravity, or their pretentions. A steady diet of parody might be hard to take, particularly in the theater; but, if experienced now and then, it can help us understand, and even appreciate, the quality, for better or worse, of works we’ve seen.