Parodies! We love 'em! Why do we do that? Why do we take some perfectly innocent song, rhyme or Christmas carol that someone has spent hours lovingly creating and deliberately ruin it - just for fun! We just can't resist, it seems. It has to be something well known in order for others to get the point. It seems it has to rhyme. (So if you don't want anyone to parody your poem make sure it doesn't rhyme!) It is often something poignant, romantic, maybe a little 'naf' and then we have just the material we need to work on. Bing Crosby's 'I'm dreaming of a white Christmas' would be eminently suitable...
Christmas carols are the perfect choice. Endowed with centuries of powerful meaning, romantic imagery and the stuff imagination and dreams are made of, Christmas carols provide the perfect medium for us to practise our art or maybe our art-less skills on. You don't have to be quite so artless as 'Jingle bells, Batman smells' but you can if the mood takes you!
One of my favourite parodies of all time is probably the Spinners' rendering of that famous tried and tested carol 'While Shepherds Watched'. At school we giggled and tittered through school singing lessons and assemblies as the most daring amongst us bravely sang out the latest version of this carol, about these rustic chaps washing their socks in the fields at night whilst the angels entertained them with heavenly melodies (tub rhyming with scrub). But the Spinners (in my opinion) did it best when they pictured the shepherds huddling in the wintry fields around a giant television screen (a drive-in movie?) and the angel of the Lord seizing the moral high ground and switching their harmless amusement from ITV to the more educational and cultured BBC (rhyming with ITV) emissions. As far as I know, ITV never won any law suits against them as a result. Sounds a bit tame recounting it like this but to its first audiences it was hilariously funny (really!).
At school in the '70s, parodies featuring the Beatles were the obvious choice. 'We Three Kings' (of Liverpool are) was transformed for us by the substitution of 'John on his scooter, blowing his hooter, Following Ringo Star'! Remember that one? We were simple folk in those days and easily pleased.
Of course, all these reminiscences and ramblings are somewhat culturally defined so probably most of my readers from Russia, Singapore and Nairobi (I wish!) have no clue as to my meaning, but I am sure there are many out there for whom this rings a bell or strikes a chord. More than one music band has made a fortune out of simply parodying someone else's material. They say nothing is original - all creativity stems from something someone else has said, written, painted already so there's no shame and no blame! Plagiarism - no! Parodying - why not?
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