Parody as Genre Entry Point

I.                     

Q: What do these books have in common: Murder on the Orient Express; Watchmen; The Colour of Magic; The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? 

A: They’re all, to varying degrees, parodies or deconstructions of the genre that they represent  - crime fiction; superhero comics/graphic novels¹; fantasy; and sci-fi, respectively. They are also, pretty much, the first of each of these genres that I encountered, certainly the first as non-kids’ books, and I've never looked back. 

I’ve been thinking about parody and deconstructions as a genre entry point for a while now, I even started writing a thing last year, but didn’t get very far. And then I saw Amanda Palmer’s blog on “Weird Al” Yankovic and discovering some music genres via his parodies, and it has kicked my arse into gear (I mean if she can finish her book, I can do a single essay, right?) 

Full disclosure: I have never really gotten the love for Weird Al’s stuff. I genuinely want to like it, but just never do. I blame not hearing it as a kid/teenager like most seem to have. It’s one of those things where multiple people whose tastes otherwise overlap with yours pretty closely are clearly getting a lot out of something in a way that leaves you cold and vaguely guilty, like you’re looking in through a window at them having a grand old time at a party, but you know that going in and asking them politely to explain what’s so fun would kill the mood, and maybe if you just watched again and tried harder next time you’d get it.²

II.

At first this idea of parody as introduction is counterintuitive – how are you going to appreciate in-jokes or the subversion of tropes when you don’t know that they exist in the first place? – but there is, I think, a somewhat convoluted logic there.

Now, I find it hard to believe that Amanda Palmer in her public persona ever asked for permission in her life (help, yes, but not permission).

But I did/do. I’m getting over it (I hope, though with lots of backsliding) but I am a classic insecure eldest child overachiever, terrified of failure and public humiliation. Which meant that even reading was fraught with the possibility of doing it wrong. Which is, from one perspective, ridiculous – it’s reading a book, privately and purely for one’s own enjoyment. But looked at in another way it’s not at all. If you know something is “meant to be” good, and particularly if you’re a precocious child whom people have praised for being “advanced” at reading, then you damn well want to like what the grown-ups like so that you don’t disappoint. 

Even if it’s a semi-rebellion (I was mainly getting books from the library, and I still remember finding the first two Hitchhiker’s Guide books for less than $1 at my brother’s school fete, and actually buying books with my own pocket money with a sense that this was something I could have for myself, my parents not being into science fiction) that pressure is still there. 

Genres are barriers – you know that these are meant to be a different type of book (a whole different type of reading, in the case of comics) and that some people don’t like them and some books don’t fit into them – and that all adds up to unspoken but oh-so-breakable rules, rules that some people out there are proud, self-proclaimed knowers of. And that means that some people out there could laugh at you and single you out for attention if you somehow get it wrong. The rules - as implied in blurbs and reviews and subtle nuances of library positioning (not the internet for me, in those days) - are about taste (“true fans of genre x know that author A is better than author B”) and more broadly about identification (how do you say “I like reading fantasy” without thinking you know what fantasy is?). I now realise that not being self-sabotagingly insecure would probably have helped with that, but I was the sort of child who was genuinely puzzled when people complained about getting “bad headaches” because, well, how did they have the presumption to assert their own pain level when they clearly had a complete lack of knowledge about how bad other people’s headaches were? Claiming to have opinions about a whole book genre I hadn’t read all of when I couldn’t even make claims about my own senses was never on the cards. 

III.

So given that I felt I needed a way in to these new things, or crucially, that I needed new things and didn’t know how to get into them, why were deconstructions and parodies a suitable gateway?

Parodies certainly do involve references and in-jokes, and I know now how much I missed in all of those books because I didn’t have a clue what was going on. But that also means there’s lampshade-hanging³ if only by negation – the trope becomes more obvious because it’s unnaturally exaggerated or inverted, and that can help a newbie to at least know that there is this thing (having a single identified murderer in a crime novel, for example) that is important in this genre. 

Parody and meta-references also take aim at the entire genre, and therefore their basic shape is likely to be almost deliberately stereotypical, so that the author steeped in the genre can play off the conventions as much as possible. (This is true of the Tales of the Black Freighter section of Watchmen, for example, even if the rest was very much experimenting with form.) That makes parody a good “type specimen” of the genus, much more so than a book trying to do something earnest near the boundaries of the form. 

So, parody can highlight what a genre’s like and provide a fairly good basis for judging whether you’re going to like more of it. But that’s all so much cover and rationalisation for the real hidden reason that I believe parodies provide a pathway into new genres and mediums, which is this: Parody gives you permission not to like something. Everyone knows that part of the enjoyment from parodies and meta-commentaries is from getting the in-jokes and references, sometimes to specific or obscure callbacks. A new bug doesn’t have to get all of it, and that meant I could relax my own demands on myself: if I didn’t like this thing that I thought I was “meant” to like, then it, and I, could be excused on the grounds of my lack of familiarity with the source material, rather than it being because I was doing it wrong by not liking something other people said was good - and then I could come back for another go later. Nothing so coherent as that went on while reading, but anything I didn’t particular enjoy could be shoved in the “must be something specific I don’t know about yet” basket without necessitating a challenge to the genre as a whole.  

IV.

I feel sorry for the child that I was – I wish I could tell her to just like what you like, dammit – but I also know that getting into new things tentatively, via the safety zone of parody, gave me enough of an escape clause to join the party and keep going.

 It’s a coward’s way in, certainly – the equivalent of sneaking in through a side-door to check out the party and be able to leave before talking to anyone – but actually I’m kind of proud. Think how easy it would have been to keep to only what was known and fed to me in reading, and music, and art. Instead, I found narrow, hidden ways to explore the strangeness - and eventually got to a comfortable place where at least as regards reading, I am happy to decide I like or don’t like a book though all the world disagree. 

I also think that being hyper-aware of others’ opinions, softened from paralysing terror of being wrong into engaged open-mindedness, can make for a better reader. From Agatha Christie I moved on in crime fiction to eventually discover the mythical hard-boiled California of Chandler and Hammett. At first I preferred the lushness and old-fashioned romance of Chandler, but the critical opinion and the sense that there was something there that I wasn’t quite getting with Hammett - that I could join the party if I just kept up a patient, questing pressure on the door - kept me coming back and re-reading. I think it was on my 6^th read of the Maltese Falcon that – snick – I finally got in: I knew why Hammett was considered better, why his stuff is genre-shifting and Chandler’s is really just the old stories, dressed up in gorgeous language and American clothing. And that revelation could only come from being willing not to trust my own initial impression, but to stay with the genre and know that the stuff with a good reputation usually had it for a reason. Thanks, Hercule Poirot!⁴