Sharing stories from our past doesn’t have to be stiff-upper-lip history lessons. Turning some points of interest into a parody makes them engaging. Laughter and emotion are powerful ways to get people engaged in your story or material. 

A parody can be a fresh way of looking at something while having a bit of fun with it. 

As part of our Supernatural study and engagement with an audience or fandom, we will examine parody. 

The first video is from Jimmy Fallon. Excellent use of humour, building his audience whilst drawing them in, which is a good entertainment tool. Sometimes a parody might go a little over the top, but not to the extent of ridiculousness. 

The types of parody that I saw succeed in fandom were those that used humour and satire for entertainment. They are specific to that fandom or subject, using easter eggs and storylines from a tv series or film makes them specialised to that particular humour. 

A film parody would include Spaceballs (1987), which touched on Star Wars and the rise of science fiction. Weird Al did well for himself with parodies of popular music. Parody takes into account the audio, visual, and storytelling elements of that particular satire. 

The video below is a parody of Jack Black’s version of the ballad “More Than Words”. 

In relation to Supernatural, humour was a bedrock of the TV series, with it an expectation among the show’s fandom. To round things out, one popular parody that went viral in fandom is added below.

The parody included easter eggs, storylines that fandom understood, as well as film buffs in general would get in the satire, which was Ghostbusters.