As for April Fool's Day, I like the idea. It's a fun celebration, where people can play practical jokes on others and have a bit of a laugh. I would, perhaps, do a post or something to celebrate, but I'm not really one for pulling off practical jokes. It's a bit too difficult, I reckon. So I've decided to do something much harder. In celebration of the holiday all about joking around, I've decided to have a little fun of my own.
The Word of the Day is: 'PARODY'.
Parody /'parədee/ n. 1. A humorous or satirical imitation of a serious piece of literature, writing or music. 2. A badly done imitation; travesty. ♦v.t. 3. To imitate (a composition, author, etc.) in such a way as to ridicule.
You know, ever since I started blogging, I came up with some ideas for cool posts and things I could do to both entertain you, and have a lot of fun myself as I try to stretch my writing muscles. One of these ideas I came up with was inspired by xkcd, the webcomic by Randall Munroe. In his earlier years of drawing comics, he decided to pay tribute to some of the other comics around the web by spending five days drawing in their style and writing in their manner to subtly mock their stranger aspects.
He did this under the banner of "Parody Week".
Now, Randall Munroe's xkcd is not the only webcomic to parody other comics, hell it wasn't even the first. But I was intrigued by this 'Parody Week' idea, and I wondered if I could something like it myself.
The idea is simple, I will write my blog in the style of other blogs for every day of one week. But there's a reason why I waited till April to do this, and it's not just because of April Fool's Day. I needed time to do research and find seven good blogs; I needed to brainstorm, work out my angle & understand their style and I also needed to see how far I could stretch the confines of blogger's HTML so I could make my blog look like the ones I was parodying. After all this time, I believe I'll be able to do it, and I'm going to, but I needed to give you guys a heads up, as this will be a little different from the usual.
The reason I write every three days rather than daily is because it takes time and effort to write blog posts, and I need time between each or I'll burn out. But for Parody Week, the plan is to write a post every day. So to make sure I don't fry my brain, I'm taking next week off.
Parody week officially starts on the 7th of April, 2013. I'll post every day for seven days. Then, after all seven posts, I will take the next week off to relax, before I continue blogging normally.
I want you to know beforehand so you don't freak out when I stop posting. I know how much this blog means to you, and I wouldn't want to upset your day with something so traumatic.
Now, according to Dictionary, parody is mostly a mean thing to do, since it's often used to ridicule. So I want to make it perfectly clear that I am not making fun of these websites to offend them, or because I don't like them. I do like them, and I read most of them quite often.
I'm just pointing out that there are some common themes or styles in these blogs, and I want to see if I can write as well as them. And where I make fun, I do so because I find the ideas amusing.
See, there's at least two ways to parody something: mockingly or reverently.
Mocking Parody is akin to when you tell people about the driver who cut you off in traffic. You often call the target bad names, and if you quote them often choose to do so in a condescending manner with the most annoying voice you can imitate (often high pitched or with poor grammar).
Reverent Parody is akin to when you tell people about a good football or sporting match you just saw. You often exaggerate the drama, adding sound effects as you mime the lead player and generally try to invoke in others the joy that you felt when you first saw the match.
I came to understand a lot of what I know about styles of parody sort of thing because of the Nostalgia Chick's video on "Dreamworks vs Disney: Dualing", but I the sentiment was originally portrayed in the quote:
"In every spoof I make real love to the things I am spoofing."
If you are making fun of something because you hate it, then it can come across as unnecessarily cruel, and some people do not respond as well towards it, especially those that you're parodying. That's not to say that there's no place for unkind or mocking parody, it can be used to illustrate a point, but since my goal is entertainment, you can look forward to seven posts about websites that I love. In fact, since I enjoy them so much, I recommend that you check them out after seeing my rendition. If you're looking for some good online reading material, these websites a good place to start looking.
As for who I plan on parodying . . . well, I want it to be something of a surprise, but let's just say I'll be doing a parody of seven of my favourite websites and online journals. If you want to know who, you can tune in every day next week and see for yourself!
