What’s the difference between satire and parody?
Well, what’s the difference between Family Guy’s first and fifteenth season? Or Shrek and Shrek: The Final Chapter? And no, the answer is not better animation.
If you’re inclined to say “well, first of all, it used to be funny”, you’re kinda right. Kinda.
Satire has a point. It’s what makes a lot of things funny to people over the age of 15. Even if you can no longer find the humor in fart jokes and puns, you will always find the humor in making fun of people for good reason. It’s why so many people get their news via John Oliver. Everything is an in-joke if you’re on the right side. If you’re making fun of someone for a good reason, it’s no longer a mean parody. It’s satire.
Once you get the hang of it, it’s pretty easy to establish one from the other. Except then you realize that satire and parody are not mutually exclusive and it gets confusing all over again. SNL can bounce back and forth from skit to skit with ease.
I still can’t believe I missed the day we watched Shrek in class.
I got back from a week of sickness and hiking up a mountain to find that I was supposed to do a project on satire. I can do that! I love being mean in a way that nobody can get mad at you for because it’s true!
Though I honestly couldn’t think of anything to do a satire on. The assignment said to base it on something I’m passionate about, but I don’t think I can satirize One Direction since they don’t really exist…
After some brainstorming with my dad (thanks, dad), I decided I was going to do it on climate change deniers. My idea was pretty simple: A newscaster is doing a story on why climate change isn’t real but keeps on getting interrupted by breaking news that is proving him otherwise.
I didn’t wanna be in a video, though.
Uh, dad, can you drive me to Granville Island and buy me a puppet?
Thanks again, dad.
I named him Jimothy.
In class, I wrote the script and all that jazz. I knew I was going to have to use a green screen, but for some reason, I didn’t want to film at school, and someone else claimed the green screen for the weekend so I had to become a crafter.
Building your own green screen is really annoying when you don’t have a light green sheet.
Okay, it’s really not that bad. I only had to drape a sheet over a couple CD shelves (yeah, my family still has fully stocked CD shelves), use masking tape to attach green construction paper to the sheet, and get like three lamps so it’s well lit enough.
And here’s the final product:
Here’s the thing: I don’t think my video is actually very funny. I didn’t really know how to make it funnier. It’s only ironic, not funny. I don’t know if it can count as satire if it’s not funny. Either way, it’s here, and….and I made it. So, uh, yeah.
RIP.