I say a parody does not have to be like this one thing, and I write them so to prove it.
The goals of my parodies, as well as how they achieve those goals, vary. They can, among other things, cleverly use the original, or be funny in a purely funny way. My various parody styles are listed on this page, and their advantages are described.
| Parody style | Most often used for | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Characterization | Any song | A parody that tells you more about whom it uses the viewpoint of than anything else. I do not have a great many of these, since I usually avoid making it matter who is singing, but this can apply to parodies about types of characters (such as pirates) as well as individuals. |
| Clever use | Songs of fodder 3 or higher | These parodies are funny because of what they do with the song. They are primarily about finding ways to work with details or play off of the original that are not too obvious. |
| Completely different take | Fodder 3 or lower | A parody that has little in common with the original song except for the tune, often done to songs I cannot work with much of, including nearly all 2-fodder songs. |
| Pleasant parody | Any song | A parody that is not all about being funny, but does not feel like it needs to be, because it features a positive sentiment or takes the audience somewhere nice. |
| Purely funny parody | Any song | Pretty self-explanatory. These parodies say things that are in themselves funny - which can be helpful, because that makes the parody amusing even to those unfamiliar with the original song. |
| Repurposed song | 5-fodder songs | A parody that is, in some way, very much like the original song. These may be finding something specific that fits the theme of the song, or serving the same purpose in the album as the original. |
| Turnabout parody | Fodder 4 or lower | A parody that is basically the opposite of the original. I usually do this to love songs, making them about bad relationships. |
| Others | Any song | Some of my parodies do not fall into any convenient style category. This is just further reflection of flexibility - you can come up with some common things to do, but should not get too fixated on always doing one of them. |
For one thing, as you can see from the table above, different parody styles are used for different songs. Sometimes a turnabout parody is quite funny, but if using that style would just make a pleasant song unpleasant, that may warrant a pleasant parody, or simply repurposing the song. A song lamenting that the life of a father is going nowhere good can easily be repurposed for the situations that have befallen the Turner family from Pirates of the Caribbean, but trying to repurpose a song about something the likes of which do not appear in that franchise? Either find another theme or choose another style, such as doing a completely new take.
The Five always relied solely on the fact that they were spoofing the tune of a known song to make their parodies funny - which turned out to not be all that reliable. Any parodist would be well advised to write some purely funny works. Also, I should not have to tell you what is wrong with never writing a pleasant parody, but just in case, the aforementioned discography page has plenty of examples to demonstrate.
Then there is what the Comic Five did do. Basically, they would do turnabout to any song that had anything resembling a direct opposite and turn everything else into something completely different. The fact that they relied almost exclusively on those same two styles is one of the reasons for their albums being so monotonous.
A certain amount of diversity can be seen from what I did with Escape. A lot of songs there turned into pleasant parodies, much easier to imagine someone like Steve Perry singing than anything by my old, bloodthirsty caricatures. Other parodies of that album did things quite similar to what the original songs did. Lay Me Down,
on the other hand, was not about capturing the personality of the original band (although the fact that all artists have their own personality can be handy if you know how to play off of them), instead being funny in a way that had little to do with the source material.