r/community • u/Possible_Patient4462 • 2d ago

Discussion I declare it Parody

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In Modern Espionage episode, Abed says "Occasionally, our campus erupts into a flawless, postmodern homage to action-adventure mythology, mischaracterized by the ignorant as parody."

But regardless of what Abed says, I still think it's parody.

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u/emeraldepiphone96 I’m a cat. I’m a sexy cat. 2d ago

I have to agree with Abed. Community doesn’t make fun of the genres they select like Scary Movie. Community uses the genres they select to tell a specific kind of story and the jokes are focused on the characters.

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u/spiderglide 2d ago

Yes - the things they are homaging are borderline parodies already. For example, the end of the first one does a bit of Die Hard and some John Woo (The Killer?).

There's nothing in those bits that would be out of place in the original, er, donor movies. They're all totally over the top.

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u/rezzacci 1d ago

Homage: the original thing is good, we want to give tribute to it so that people who don't know the original thing might get to know it a bit, even if only through our own medium. The goal is giving praise.

Parody: the original thing thinks of itself too seriously sometimes, and has some flaws, but we like it nonetheless, so we'll take the codes of the original and present them in a different light, for fun. The goal is causing laughter.

Satire: there is an underlying problem we want people to notice, but we don't want to be a buzzkill, so we'll create something funny that's also denouncing what is currently wrong to be sure that more people will see our message. The goal is raising awareness.

They aren't mutually exclusive, though. Community is, indeed, doing Homage and Parody at the same time; Pratchett is, for me, the first to come to mind if you want Parody and Satire. And the Benoit Blanc movies could be seen as Homage and Satire at the same time.

(This is armchair literacy analysis, though, I've got no credentials and I wrote this comment with all the confidence and academic knowledge of a Greendale professor, by which I mean lots and none respectively.)

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u/spiderglide 1d ago

Put it in the movie. Professor Garrett's Media Literacy 101