{"id":4656,"date":"2010-07-22T12:36:44","date_gmt":"2010-07-22T16:36:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=4656"},"modified":"2010-07-22T10:41:07","modified_gmt":"2010-07-22T14:41:07","slug":"cultivating-a-taste-for-parody","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2010\/07\/22\/cultivating-a-taste-for-parody\/","title":{"rendered":"Cultivating a taste for parody"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.economist.com\/node\/16588054?story_id=16588054&#038;fsrc=scn\/tw\/te\/rss\/pe\" target=\"_blank\"><em>The Economist<\/em><\/a> reviews <em>The Oxford Book of Parodies<\/em> by John Gross:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Writing a parody is hard. In the 1940s, a competition in the <em>New Statesman<\/em> invited readers to parody Graham Greene. Greene himself entered under a pseudonym and only came second. Get it right, though, and you have a withering form of criticism and an immortal entertainment rolled into one. John Gross\u2019s new anthology of parodies in English (with a few foreign titbits) has samples both high and low of this diverse genre.<\/p>\n<p>[. . .]<\/p>\n<p>Any well-known poem or character is fair game. A.A. Milne\u2019s Christopher Robin is revisited as an ailing pensioner who has retired to Spain (\u201cHe peers through a pair of bifocals;\/He talks quite a lot to a bear that he\u2019s got\/Who is known as El Pu to the locals.\u201d) Ezra Pound wrote a wintry variation on \u201cSumer is icumen in\u201d (\u201c\u2026skiddeth bus and sloppeth us\u2026\u201d) But why limit oneself to a single writer? Portmanteau parodies let writers do two voices at once, thus \u201cChaucer\u201d rewrites Sir John Betjeman (\u201cA Mayde ther was, y-clept Joan Hunter Dunn\u2026\u201d) and \u201cDylan Thomas\u201d redoes \u201cPride and Prejudice\u201d (\u201cIt is night in the smug snug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug household of Mr and Mrs Dai Bennet and their simpering daughters &mdash; five breast-bobbing man-hungry titivators, innocent as ice-cream, panting for balls and matrimony.\u201d)<\/p>\n<p>[. . .]<\/p>\n<p>Documents, philosophies and schools of thought can be good fodder, too. H.L. Mencken did a \u201cDeclaration of Independence in American\u201d (\u201cWhen things get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody . . .\u201d)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Economist reviews The Oxford Book of Parodies by John Gross: Writing a parody is hard. In the 1940s, a competition in the New Statesman invited readers to parody Graham Greene. Greene himself entered under a pseudonym and only came second. Get it right, though, and you have a withering form of criticism and an [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,57,28],"tags":[86,591,463,592],"class_list":["post-4656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-humour","category-media","tag-criticism","tag-hlmencken","tag-parody","tag-poetry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-1d6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4656"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4665,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4656\/revisions\/4665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}