Parody

Parody, comic imitation of a piece of writing. For the ancient Greeks it was a comic imitation of a serious poem. The term has come to be applied also to the comic imitation of history, fiction, scientific writing, or any other prose.

Parody, like travesty, is a form of burlesque. The essence of parody is the treatment of a light theme in the style appropriate to a serious work. “The Nun's Priest's Tale” from The Canterbury Tales by the 14th-century English writer Geoffrey Chaucer is an example of such a treatment; in this tale the hubbub caused by Master Reynard the fox in the widow's barnyard is described in language suggestive of the fall of Troy (see Trojan War). The humor lies in the contrast between subject matter and the treatment of it. In travesty, the characters of the original are turned to a humorous account by some change in the incidents that results in a debasement of the original theme. In parody, the theme and the characters are greatly modified or completely changed, but the style of the original is closely followed in those peculiarities that easily lend themselves to ridicule.

Most famous writers have been parodied, and those who have written parody include Aristophanes, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, William Makepeace Thackeray, James Joyce, Sir Max Beerbohm, and Ogden Nash.