The following is a fan-based parody of a fan-based parody...
— Naruto: The Abridged Comedy Fandub Spoof Series Show opening disclaimer
Parodies make fun of dramas, comedies, action, romance and every other genre imaginable. But what about other parodies?
Yup. They mock those too.
These targeted spoofs, like all works, conform to certain rules and vary in quality, creating room for other works to give them a taste of their own medicine.
For cases when a spoof doesn't realize that its source material is a spoof, see Spoofed the Ironic Film Seriously. When the spoof unwittingly lifts a joke directly from the source spoof, it's a Redundant Parody.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles started off as a parody of Daredevil but soon enough got several parodies of its own, the most well-known of which is Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters.
Fan Works
- Chapter 5, "Tale of the Bash"
, of the Baldur's Gate parody fanfic "Children of Balls", parodies the whole concept of usually humorous "bashing stories" that take revenge on a particular character. "Children of Balls" itself is in large part built around hating Abdel Adrian, the protagonist of the Baldur's Gate novelisations, but the writer tries to make the point here that bashing stories tend not to reflect the actual features of the character being attacked, and hence reflect the writer's animosity rather than presenting valid criticism and good parody. Thus, this chapter tells about a character referred to as "[insert the name of a character you don't like]."
- "Gendo's Paradise" is an old AMV using Neon Genesis Evangelion footage that homages/parodies "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Amish Paradise", which in turn was a parody of "Gangsta's Paradise" by Coolio.
Films — Live-Action
- The movie Not Another Not Another Movie tells the story of a talentless team of moviemakers who make a parody movie in the vein of the many spoofs from the 2000s.
- The first Austin Powers films were spoofs of spy films, particularly James Bond. The third installment just mocked its own predecessors — movies that were themselves parodies.
Live-Action TV
- David Brent of The Office (UK) parodies the tendency for British mimics to spoof comic personas like Dame Edna. Brent fancies himself a genius comedian; his reliance on riffing on these kinds of characters is a pretty good clue that ultimately, he has nothing.
- David Brent's Transatlantic Equivalent, Michael Scott, is also shown to fall back on stock parodies and well-worn catchphrases, often cribbed from Saturday Night Live. His failure with these mocks the routines themselves.
- How I Met Your Mother: In one episode, Ted suggests that Weird Al Yankovic do a parody called "Wake Me Up Before You Pogo".
- 30 Rock: Weird Al's many food-related parodies got some fun poked at them in an episode where all of Jenna's serious songs were "parodied" by someone who simply replaced the lyrics with names of food.
- Mr. Show has a sketch including a Weird Al Yankovic expy parodying a current event by inserting a lame, food-based pun.
- The Saturday Night Live sketches from The '80s where Joe Piscopo parodied David Letterman, since Letterman's edition of Late Night was already a send-up of talk show and variety show conventions.
Music
- The Rutles, generally speaking. The Beatles were well aware of the absurdities of pop stardom and more than willing to send themselves up, so any parody Beatles band is bound to run into this trope. If you don't know the chronology it can be hard to tell if "Piggy in the Middle" is a parody of "I am the Walrus" or vice versa.
- It's worth pointing out that, despite him being culturally omnipresent in the early 2000s, funny spoofs of Eminem's music only really started to emerge after his Recovery era, when he started putting out more earnest, serious radio-friendly hip-hop music instead of the largely humourous and ironic music he made until then - his originals would always be better crafted and funnier, so parodists left him alone. Even the parody of him on Brass Eye (in which a paedophile rapper tells an absurd story about how his father raped him while he was a foetus, rhyming 'cervix' with 'perv dicks') is so close to his style of the time that it comes across as an excuse for Chris Morris to create a loving pastiche of his work, rather than criticise it.
Professional Wrestling
- Dramatic Dream Team is a merciless parody of American professional wrestling(sometimes Mexicans get a pass because of some of its alumni had a good relationship with CMLL), and that includes parts of American pro wrestling that were already self parody, such as the Chicago hot potato title belt that was "awarded" to losers, which DDT parodied with "The King Of Dark" title belt, which in addition to that wasn't even allowed outside of dark matches, dooming the hapless "champions" to obscurity.
- The Human Tornado verges between tribute and parody to Dolemite, a Blaxploitation Parody film.
- Jimi Mayhem, a parody of Shonuff from The Last Dragon, a martial arts film parody. He even interrupted a screening of the movie on its anniversary!
Toys
- The Wacky Packages subline "Wonky Packages" uses parodying parodies as their main existence. First, Wacky Packages parodies an existing product. Then, the Wonky Packages are parodies of this parody, further pulling them away from the original product.
Web Comics
- Small Bots, a comic-within-a-comic in Shortpacked! which parodies Lil Formers, which parodies Transformers.
Web Original
- Many web sources have tried their hand spoofing the critically panned works of Seltzer and Friedberg.
- Cracked capped its analysis of the movies with an insulting, fake movie trailer transcript for a future installment: Vampire Movie. This proved eerily prescient; Seltzer and Friedberg's next film turned out to be Vampires Suck. Heck, the trailer narration even used the same pun as Vampires Suck's title. Not to mention the prediction that a theoretical Seltzer and Friedberg Twilight spoof, despite inevitably being horrible, would also make money nonetheless.note
- The Soup similarly offered its parody of the parodies, titled Reference Movie.
- Cracked capped its analysis of the movies with an insulting, fake movie trailer transcript for a future installment: Vampire Movie
- Phelous has done this a few times on April Fools' Day. The first time, he did a parody review of a parody series he starred in called Mortal Komedy. He mocked the series' meta jokes and terrible fight choreography. In 2015, he mocked his review of Mac and Me for its awkward joke deliveries. Seven years later, he made a review of that review.
- Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series frequently has lines taken directly from the 4Kids Entertainment Yu-Gi-Oh! dub, sometimes lampshaded with "Actual 4Kids Dialogue," and sometimes not. Although it seems like a standard Abridged Series practice to mock bad dialogue, 4Kids themselves frequently inserted metacommentary and self-parody into the series. LittleKuriboh himself called the writers "very meta and very funny."
- Tony Zaret parodies "funny satire" videos, often taking on the role of an edgy conservative pretending to be a "cringe liberal".
Western Animation
- Star Wars spoofs have become so common that when South Park does a brief one at the start of its final "Imaginationland" episode, it called out the concept as unoriginal and then chastised itself for relying on it.
- The Simpsons have taken several shots at MAD:
- "The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson" featured a peek inside the MAD offices. A group of writers tries to come up with a witty name for an Everybody Loves Raymond spoof. "How about Everybody Hates Raymond?" suggests one writer, to unanimous applause.
- In "Bart of Darkness", Bart reads a MAD strip on "The Lighter Side of Hippies" and comments "They don't care whose toes they step on!"
- In "New Kids on the Blechh", the MAD parody of Party Posse consists entirely of cheap Punny Names like Smellson.
- Family Guy: Brian and Stewie found themselves transported into the world of Robot Chicken in Season 8 episode "Road To The Multiverse." The characters mocked the show's tendency to use references as jokes.
- Johnny Test: Dark Vegan and the episode he debuted in, "Johnny Test in Outer Space", were parodies of Dark Helmet and Spaceballs respectively, which in turn were parodies of Darth Vader and Star Wars
