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(Tips, Tricks, & Techniques provides how-to information about folk music and other topics. Want to see a list of earlier installments?) THE ART (???) AND SCIENCE OF PARODY It has often been said that puns are the lowest form of humor; many a comedian or composer has sneeringly posited the corollary that parody is the lowest form of songwriting. Hey, I resemble that remark! Those familiar with my earliest work in the comedy club trenches over 20 years ago, as well as those whose introduction to my songwriting comes from my submissions to the Chicago Bar Association's Christmas Spirits and cast party shows, know me as primarily a humorous songwriter and specifically a parodist. It is true that parody is often the path of least resistance for the neophyte lyricist, and there are some truly dreadful examples floating around that ought instead to have been tied to an anvil and allowed to quietly sink to the bottom of the comedic sea. There have also been some brilliant classics—many of which have been written by the same famous parodist who has penned a few of the aforementioned stinkers (who shall go nameless, although his last name rhymes with "Prank-n-shtick"). At the risk of drawing wisecracks such as "those who can, do, and those who can't, teach," I'm sharing some of my secrets for writing parodies without getting sued or hunted down like a dog and killed by the writers of the songs I've spoofed. Hopefully, the results will even be funny. First, decide why you want to write a parody rather than an original song. There is no shame in admitting that creating melodies is not your strong suit, if that's your primary motivation and you don't intend your efforts be for public consumption. You might also have to write a parody if the situation mandates one rather than an original-for instance, satirical revues, in which you have a limited time in which to get an entire cast and chorus (some of whom may not sight-read music) to learn a group of songs, or a limited budget for charts and arrangements for a hired (and often union) band. It's always easiest and most efficient when you need to write and teach only lyrics instead of music. Another reason to write a parody is that a particular song is just plain asking for it: either it has been overexposed or its title or lyrics suggest a parody just too delicious to pass up. Perhaps there's been a news event that is a match made in heaven for a particular song title-and rewriting that title just a little bit would hit the g-spot ("g" as in "giggle," get your mind out of the gutter). Perhaps you are doing a tribute to or even a "roast" of a friend or co-worker. I won't address the "serious" type of tribute parody—I've never been able to write one without becoming mired in pretension or sentimental goo. If I'm so moved by a person that I feel compelled to honor her or him in song, I feel that nothing less than an original will do. I've always felt that if something is worth a serious song, adapting someone else's music and lyric scheme is gratingly out-of-place, sort of like arranging Beethoven's Ninth for ocarina (kazoo, on the other hand, has definite potential). "Roasts," however, are tailor-made for parodies. An audience's recognition of both the "base" song and justification for spoofing both it and its intended target will lead them to "get" the joke that much faster. Given the ephemeral nature of current events, you might not want to waste an original melody on a song with a shelf life shorter than that of a Popsicle in a power failure (or your conscience or pride may prevent you from recycling your own melodies to fit the march of time). However, if you are not under time or subject-matter constraints and the title of a preexisting song doesn't practically cry out to be parodied, you are in danger of falling into the Valley of the Shadow of Death—or at the least, the Sea of Flop-Sweat. Comedienne Brett Butler (with a name like that, she already knows to tread carefully) once mentioned that the most painful part of her open-mike years was having to follow so-called comics whose repertoires consisted of lame parodies such as Hit Me With a Pork Chop. (For those who are too young to remember the early 1980s, the "base" song was Pat Benatar's Hit Me With Your Best Shot.) That particular title is an example of a truly irrelevant parody—you can tell that the lyric is going nowhere but downhill after an only mildly clever title—a premise that can't be effectively fulfilled, a bomb that has detonated before the fuse is even lit. Beginning parodists often fall into this trap, finding that they have no rationale or context for the lyric but feeling they must write some kind of lyric anyway. A corollary is the parody that has worn out its welcome—it is not always necessary to make your lyrics as long as the original song's if something shorter will get the message across (as Ralph Covert calls it, the "get-me-home rule"). An even more flawed type of parody is one that has utterly nothing to do with the original song—sort of the "lazy person's parody" in which the new lyric's only similarity to the original is that it fits the original's meter. Rarely do these work—Homer and Jethro's Mama, Don't Whup Little Buford (based on the traditional Beautiful, Beautiful Brown Eyes and cited in a 1981 article in the marvelous, but long-defunct magazine Come For To Sing) is a rare exception. Generally (unless you are writing parodies as part of a satirical revue), the expository phrase, "To the tune of" is all too often a warning that something unfunny is about to happen, sort of a "Danger: Falling Flop Zone" road sign. So what makes a truly great parody (she says as she modestly prepares to present examples from her own body of work)? It's that magic synergy of a new lyric closely tracking the original in not only meter, but rhyme scheme and subject matter as well. A telltale sign of a truly amateurish parody is a metrical train wreck—too many or inconsistent syllables, or em-PHA-sis on the wrong syl-LA-ble. On the other hand, a lyric whose cadence falls as naturally as a spoken sentence, with economy of words (especially a single word serving as an entire metrical phrase), is not only a thing of beauty, but a more effective humor delivery device. It's not as easy to show you specifically how to achieve this as it is to assure you that (as with Justice Potter Stewart and pornography) you'll know it when you see it. In fact, you'll not only know it right away, but you'll feel it too—you may find yourself giggling as you read it. A truly great parody will be clever without seeming precious. A dependable way to achieve this is to have your new lyric track the original in not only meter, but in rhyme scheme as well—especially internal rhymes. I've discovered that this is easiest to do when I have the original lyrics in front of me. The Con Man, which is the official Michael-Smith-sanctioned parody of his folk classic hit for Steve Goodman, The Dutchman (and Smith has gone on record as truly detesting most parodies, not just those of his own songs), is probably my most-requested song. I took great pains to analyze each line of The Dutchman and adapt the rhyme, meter, and even phraseology as closely as I could to my premise of an aging New Jersey Mafioso as spoof of Smith's retired Amsterdam seaman. Unlike most of my songs and parodies, it was inspired not by the title or even a desire to adapt it to a particular subject matter (this was 20 years before The Sopranos, after all), but by the chorus of the original. More accurately, my dear departed friend Ed Sunden was dyspeptically inspired by hearing one too many excruciating open mike renditions of The Dutchman; when the hapless performer onstage at the time launched into "Let us go to the banks of the ocean," Ed began to sing, "Let us go to the bank and get money." I grabbed a cocktail napkin, excused myself, and dashed into the bathroom to follow up on that line before I could forget my idea. Keeping it in "the bank," I continued, instead of "where the walls rise above the Zuider Zee," with "from a teller who is scared enough to pee." It logically followed that the song should be about someone who would be naturally inclined to carry out a bank heist. Thus, Margaret became Lefty, Amsterdam became Hackensack, Rotterdam became Leavenworth, and so on. I feel that The Con Man is not only a parody of The Dutchman, but also a salute to it. There is another hilarious Michael Smith parody, specifically Bob Berlien's deliciously wicked (and understandably unrecorded) takeoff on the gorgeous Spoon River. It is so politically incorrect that I think I'll let him take the heat for writing it and refrain from quoting any of it. But he followed the same principles as I did, and it shows. Kathy Routliffe's spoof of the old chestnut, Banks of the Ohio, Banks of the Chicago, is not far behind. There is an old cassette tape of it—featuring someone you might know on harmony and truly atrocious lead guitar-floating around the WFMT studios; call The Midnight Special to request it. The purported artists are "Anne Hills Brothers, Cindy Mangle, and Paul Bridengroom." Revisiting Ralph's "get-me-home rule," sometimes less truly is more in music as well as architecture. Hence my affection for the Bauhaus of satire, what I like to call the "pocket parody." Short and sweet (or acerbic), it is surgically precise and gets the job done with impressive efficiency. Basically, it consists of a recitation of the original's first line followed by the parodist's brief takeoff, preferably no longer than one more line. The first and best one I ever heard was, "Hello, young lovers: you're under arrest;" and before it became more overexposed than Christina Aguilera in her Dirrty video, "You fill up my senses, like a fart in a phone booth." Two I've written are "I was stealing when I wrote this&ldots;so sue me." (note that I didn't even write a line—the creativity is in the brutal abridgement) and "You got a fast car. I want a ticket&ldots;so let me drive." Come to think of it, this is a great homework assignment—not too difficult; and once you get the hang of a good pocket parody, you'll have a better instinct for writing truly funny longer ones. I won't give you any further examples of my version of the process, as I am reminded of the adage that two things one ought never see being made are sausages and legislation—yeah, I know, there ought to be a law against lyrical hot-dogging. Now that you know what to do, grab a pen and get thee to a punnery.
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