[Shop] Essay on Parody
Opus
play writing, by the playwright himself. Check it out, if you're so
inclined. This guy was my tutor on my one-woman show, and is absolutely
fantastic. Check out his web-site, you can also join the group from
there: http://www.jeffreysweet.com . He's been nominated for emmys,
sits on the council of the Dramatist's Guild, teaches writing at the
Actors' Studio in NY, and is resident playwright at the Victory Gardens
Theatre in Chicago, to name a very few accolades.
Enjoy.
Opus
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Parody
The lights come up on me wearing a toga-like thing with vines
painted on
it. Under this a pair of green tights. On my head is some sort of
vegetablish crown. I think my face is painted green, too.
I stand with my jaw jutting, hands on hips. Next to me sits the
model of
a cozy little house. Over a speaker, a cute voice chirps a phrase
familiar
from TV commercials of the time: "Hey, Green Giant, what's new
besides
ho-ho-ho?" I bellow, "Ha-ha-ha!" and stomp the little house to
smithereens.
I don't remember who came up with this blackout (I swear I
didn't). It
was part of the 1966 edition of the annual student-written talent
show my
high school presented under the title YAMO (which allegedly stood
for Youth
of American March On).
Pretty adolescent stuff. And the adolescents in the audience
laughed
their heads off.
But, when you come down to it, isn't parody frequently the
expression of
adolescent impulse? You're a teenager surrounded by images of adult
artifacts. How better to declare your skepticism/contempt by making
fun of
these? It is not for nothing that Mad Magazine and Saturday Night
Live count
teens as their core audience.
Before going further, I think I should note that, despite muddy
popular
usage, "parody" and "satire" are not synonyms. Satire is the comedy
of
attack, using humor as a weapon against that which offends the
author's moral
sensibilities. (Satire cannot exist without a moral framework. How
can you
attack something as being "wrong" if you don't have some sense of in
what
direction "right" lies?) A parody is a category of satire, taking
shots at
what is fallacious in alleged works of art ("works of art" being a
sufficiently elastic term to include TV commercials and political
speeches).
You can do a parody of a movie, but you can't do a parody of, say,
Trent
Lott. (But you sure could make Trent Lott the object of satire.
And you
could write a parody of a Trent Lott speech.)
Parody may target either an individual work or a genre. Mel
Brooks has
done both. Young Frankenstein is a spoof of the film Frankenstein,
deriving
much of its effectiveness from the audience's familiarity with the
original
movie and the degree to which Brooks goofs on it. In contrast,
Brooks's
Blazing Saddles is a parody of the Western genre in general. In it
he
subverts the catalogue of conventions he expects the viewer to know
intimately from films like High Noon, Shane, My Darling Clementine,
Rio Bravo
and Destry Rides Again.
Skillful parody doesn't merely knock the work or genre in
question. It
is also examines and challenges the values implicit in what's being
mocked;
it questions what in these works appeals to an audience in the first
place
and then questions the taste of an audience that would respond to
such stuff.
One of the reasons I so admire Urinetown is that it plays this
game
particularly well. Quite apparently, the show mocks the
socially-conscious
musical, taking shots at everything from Mahagonny to West Side
Story to Les
Miserables. But it also suggests that while hip playgoers pat
themselves on
the back for supporting work that proclaims their progressive
political
credentials, they are really as interested in showbiz pizzaz as the
audience
for such traditional escapist fare as 42nd Street. Whenever Little
Sally,
one of the show's narrators, suggests that it might be appropriate
to delve
into an issue that would require more sophisticated analysis, her
partner
Officer Lockstock demurs, telling her that the audience won't sit
still for
too much exposition, and that it's better to concentrate on one big
idea than
risk confusing the patrons with subtler and more detailed
considerations.
The authors are suggesting that the audience will accept a dollop of
social
consciousness as long as it doesn't get in the way of entertainment.
One of the reasons parody is so popular with young writers is
that it
relieves them of much of the difficulty of coming up with an
original idea
for a piece. The work or genre you're parodying provides you with
ready-to-use elements – plot, characters, setting, etc. If you
were going to
parody, say, David Auburn's Proof, you'd start off knowing your
central
character is a brilliant young woman of uncertain mental balance who
plays
scenes on the back porch of a Chicago house with a dead genius
father, has an
interfering sister and a new suitor. That's a lot to start with.
(If I were
going to parody Proof, I think I would make Daddy a chef and have
nobody
believe the daughter could possibly have invented the perfect egg
salad
sandwich.)
The various TV series starring Sid Caesar in the Fifties
(beginning with
the legendary Your Show of Shows) featured a constant outpouring of
sketches
that took off on popular movies and plays of the day. (You owe it
to
yourself to see Caesar as Montgomery Bugle in YSOS's version of From
Here to
Eternity.) Among the writers who supplied material for him were
(surprise)
Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Carl Reiner, Larry Gelbart,
Michael
Stewart and Joseph Stein. Several of these went on to write scripts
with
elements of parody, among them Little Me, Love and Death, Dead Men
Don't Wear
Plaid, City of Angels, The Cheap Detective, Tootsie and Movie,
Movie. I
think it's fair to assume that their work with Caesar had something
to do
with the work they did after Caesar.
Most of these people also went on to write scripts that weren't
based in
parody – Lost in Yonkers, Manhattan, Barbarians at the Gate, and
Fiddler on
the Roof among them. My hunch is that some of what they learned
writing
parodies carried over into the crafting of their more serious work.
Just as
art students often go to museums and sit in front of paintings with
their
sketch pads to assimilate the masters' technique by imitation, so
parodists
assimilate technique of more established writers whose work they
must study
before fooling with it. You can learn a lot about how something is
built by
taking it apart. It doesn't always follow that those who can take
something
apart also know how to put something together, but analysis and
synthesis are
related skills. Neil Simon, in his memoir Rewrites, talks about how
much he
learned about construction when he was assigned by Caesar's producer
Max
Liebman to write new adaptations of old musicals for TV.
Of course, parodies predated Sid Caesar. In his book, Tragedy
and
Comedy, Walter Kerr describes a typical day of theatre in ancient
Greece.
The bulk of the event would be taken up by a tragic trilogy, a la
the Orestia
of Aeschylus. According to Kerr, this "was almost invariably
followed in
performance by a fourth piece, presumably written by the same
author, in
which the same material he had been treating so tragically was
suddenly
seized by the bootstraps and turned upside down until apples and
silverware
and every sort of improper thing plummeted out of its pockets. This
aftermath, or mocking of what had been so solemnly pursued, was
called a
satyr play ... our term ‘satire' has come from it."
Old or new, the technique of the parodist is to identify some
tendency
present in the original and exaggerate it to the point of the
ridiculous.
One of my favorite parodies is a Second City takeoff on Death of a
Salesman.
In Arthur Miller's original, Biff tells Willy that he purposely
sabotaged a
job interview by stealing the interviewer's pen. In the Second City
version,
Biff agonizes over having made off with the man's desk.
The parody is by definition a parasitic form, drawing much of
its energy
from work originally created by someone else. The parodist is from
the same
tribe as the people armed with marking pens who can't resist adding
handlebar
mustaches to posters of cover girls. Yes, the impulse is
adolescent, but it
is also a statement of defiance. When defiance matures, the
parodist is
likely to come up with work of substance ... creating a fresh target
for
someone else's wit.
Alaric
My Buffy parody's in the works. <g>
"Opus" <opus...@bloomcounty.com> wrote in message
news:3C38AA7F...@birdwoman.net...
Anopheles
"Opus" wrote:
> This is a post I received last night from an e-mail list I belong to on
> play writing, by the playwright himself. Check it out, if you're so
> inclined. This guy was my tutor on my one-woman show, and is absolutely
> fantastic. Check out his web-site, you can also join the group from
> there: http://www.jeffreysweet.com . He's been nominated for emmys,
> sits on the council of the Dramatist's Guild, teaches writing at the
> Actors' Studio in NY, and is resident playwright at the Victory Gardens
> Theatre in Chicago, to name a very few accolades.
>
> Enjoy.
>
> Opus
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Parody
<snip>
Great read, Opus. Thanks.
Anopheles
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