As Promised! Enjoy the Parodies!

Hi Everyone!!! Hope you're all enjoying the humor of our group's blog so far. As I mentioned in the previous post, I'm going to be sharing with you the funny side of parodies in Social Media. Now, if you're like most people, when I say "parody" you probably think Weird Al, Cledus T. Judd, Family Guy, Spaceballs, etc. You would be correct! Parodies are ways of playing off common things we include in our everyday lives: music, movies, stores, products, just about anything really. Parodies found in Social Media are often as a result of what users find to be entertaining. Something I'm noticing a lot right now that's popular are things called "memes". I wouldn't exactly call them parodies, but it's going to help illustrate my point. The idea is taking something common and finding a way to manipulate it into an amusing format. Right now students at my college are taking common ideas such as our student dining, programs, Internet (or lack thereof), etc. and then adding pictures from various cultural references to depict jokes about these topics. That's essentially the concept of parodies! The awesome thing about parodies is that they can fall under a number of subject areas in humor such as political, entertainment, career-related humor, or even other parodies. I think you get idea.... Allow me to provide you with some examples of my favorite parodies:

This is my favorite Weird Al parody for two reasons: 1. It's to the tune of Gangster's Paradise by Coolio (you know, "been spending most our lives living in a gangster's paradise") and 2. It's the Amish!!!!! My college is an area where there's a strong Amish population so I can relate to the Amish references in this video. Weird Al does many parodies picking on just about anything popular that people are familiar with and based on what's "big" at the time. When this video was released, Coolio's song was one of the most popular songs at that time.

I just found this one on Google as I was typing this post and found it kind of funny. Naturally you can see this picture is a parody of Harry Potter and is playing off the characters plus using an association with Harry's last name. Side note, does anyone else think the "Harry" in this picture looks more like an adult Ron? Anyway, this is just another good example of parodies playing off of movies/books.

Yes, I'm a total Star Wars nut! I just had to share this though because I think it's a good comparison of showing what really happened in the movie and what Family Guy did to make it funny (or even funnier than it was). Shows like Family Guy, The Simpsons, Saturday Night Live, and MadTV are famous for doing these parodies as they draw a lot of audience attention to cultural references. Star Wars is obviously a well known Pop Culture icon globally and is easily recognized by people all over the world. Plus the clip is just freaking absolute funny!

Ok this is my last example, and you probably get the idea by now. But honestly I just could not resist this! Like the Harry Potter picture, I found this on Google and had... well.... multiple reactions to this! If anything this will give you a good laugh! Seriously though, the concept of parodies can be applied to just about anything (as long as it's done right)

Well thanks for laughing along with me everyone! Hope you enjoyed the post and please leave any comments to our blog's posts, as we encourage perspectives from others and value any points you'd like to make! Take care everyone and go get your funny on ;)