When discussing parody, I believe that there are two schools of thought on the matter.

There’s the ‘’mindless parody’’, where there’s not much of a plot, but really only a flimsy clothesline to link gags and where the characters are not really characters, but nothing more than targets for punchlines.

Take the Scary Movie films for example, where it tried to link various horror film scenarios together in a comical way. It made an attempt at cohesive story lines, well at least the first film did and sometimes it worked, but after a while, it got stale and the films and their comic bits became driven by scatological based humor, which can be funny, but it also gets tiresome, as evidenced in other parody attempts like Disaster Movie and Not Another Teen Movie (and many others of that oeuvre) which all proved to be dismal misfires in the genre, mostly because they relied only on the scatological and on nothing else.

Like any good film or play, story is everything, even in a parody. Just look at the classics like Airplane and The Naked Gun, which were able to combine some scatological with the clever and still engage the audience with the story, something films like Disaster Movie and Meet The Spartans were not able to accomplish.

To this critic, caring nothing for the high box office receipts some of these films have acquired, feel that many of these films of late have given the art form of ‘’parody’’ a bad name.  Yes, I called it an art form.

In discussing the other school of thought, which I shall call the ‘’detailed parody’’, let’s take the theatrical production of The 39 Steps, which I had the pleasure of seeing both in London and here in New York a few years back.  

While not a parody per se, it did, quite perfectly, present a wonderful send up of that original Alfred Hitchcock film, which was not a comedy, but the production elevated that original source material and proved to be hysterically funny because of it’s quick pace, intelligent and imaginative staging and most impressive of all, a certain reverence and dedication to the period and style that was being parodied.  I don’t get that feeling from the Scary Movie films.