Parody Impossible?
I used to write more parodies for this blog, and some posts were quite popular, such as this one about it being illegal to call anemonefish “Nemo”, and about an unfair cheater at a cock-fight.
Without ever making a conscious decision to stop writing parodies, I wrote fewer and fewer such posts. I only recently came across Poe’s law:
Poe’s law is an adage of Internet culture stating that, without a clear indicator of the author’s intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views such that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied.
I agree with the notion in the Wiki article that voice inflections and body language are absent on the internets, and hence parody and sarcasm are harder to discern, but there is more at play. I am in no way obsessed with the constant cycle of public pseudo-scandals and outrage-fests, and even try to avoid all of these. But just in the corner of my eye, when trying to read what I consider real news (wars, environmental problems, economy…) I can’t escape them. It seems that their real-world absurdity is hard to top.
This has very little to do with “left” and “right”, which have become parodies of the original meaning of these terms anyway, and the loud extremes of both sides seem to cling to obviously absurd, scientifically falsified, radically un-commonsensically ideological nonsense. And they cling to it with the moralistic humor-less seriousness of true believers. I don’t even have to give you any examples here, many will pop into your mind. This trend, as so often with cultural trends, is more pronounced in the Uh-Es of A, since 1. there is a massive media industry there which needs nonsense to amplify it into click-bait, and 2. the US started as a colony of pilgrims – moralizing religious fanatics – and this has aftereffects to this day onto the prevalent mentality, at least in some circles. I used to live there, and I loved it, but this vibe is hard to miss. The effects of this cultural trend are not restricted to the US of course, and sadly swap over into other parts of the world like diathetic feces balanced on a wheelbarrow filled to the brink being pushed along a cobblestone road.
So maybe these cultural dynamics have spoiled my appetite for creating parodies. I just have to read the “news” and get my fix of absurdity.
Interestingly the Wired article about Poe’s law cited in Wikipedia is only from 2017. This trend of cultural humor-less-ness is accelerating very recently.
Wot Are You Thinking About?
Serious times, too serious for my taste. Have a laugh at this:
