Ask someone what his or her favorite parody movie is and you’ll hear Blazing Saddles, Airplane!, or some other classic of the genre. But ask what their favorite parody novel is and you’ll likely get a blank stare. To help you answer this difficult, life-defining question the next time you’re asked, here are the stories of a few novels that get the last laugh.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings has sold more than 150 million copies and been translated into over 35 languages since it was first published in 1955. While it has never reached the original’s level of success, the parody novel Bored of the Rings has become something of an institution in its own right. Written by Henry Beard and Douglas Kenney, the duo who would later found National Lampoon, the book has been reprinted and updated since it was first published in 1969, including a new version printed just this year.
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As is typical of the Lampoon style, many of the place and character names in Bored use pop culture references, adult humor, or just plain funny substitutions for the originals. For example, the characters include Frito (Frodo), Spam (Sam), Pepsi (Pippen), Legolam (Legolas), Gimlet, son of Groin (Gimli, son of Gloin), and the especially racy for the time Dildo (Bilbo). The oft-updated parody map of Middle Earth, modeled after Tolkien’s, includes locations such as “The Land of the Personal-Stereo-Wearing Goblins,” “The Bodily Wastes,” and the legendary land of “Gonad.”
George Orwell’s Animal Farm tells the story of barnyard animals that throw off the yoke of their human masters and learn to live together, taking only as much of the farm’s output as they need. However, their peaceful arrangement is usurped by the power-hungry pig, Napoleon, who ousts the unspoken leader of the group, another pig named Snowball. Soon, Napoleon rules the barnyard with an iron fist, and the animals find they’re worse off than they were under their human master.
The book is an analogy of the downward spiral of the Soviet model of Communism and, because of its scathing, political satire, has endured as a classic of the post-World War II era. To many readers, this condemnation of Communism leads them to assume Capitalism is the better solution. What Orwell intended is a topic better discussed in many a high school English paper. However, this common assumption was enough to convince John Reed to write a parody sequel of the book called Snowball’s Chance. Reed uses an analogous style similar to Orwell’s to tell the story of political events since Animal Farm‘s 1945 publication in an effort to show that even Capitalism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
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At the beginning, Napoleon has died, allowing Snowball the opportunity to return and regain power. Through political connections, he soon converts the farm into a very successful, money-making amusement park called “Animal Farm.” As the barnyard’s population grows, so does the demand for electricity, which the lone windmill constructed years ago cannot sufficiently supply. So they build a second mill and dub them The Twin Mills. Still, they hunger for power, so they sue their way to a controlling interest in a nearby river to set up power generators. This means the long-standing beaver dams that block the water must be destroyed. Expelled from their land, the beavers instigate a violent resistance movement, offering suicidal recruits the promise of a wondrous afterlife, rewarded with 1,600 trees to chew. The climax details the attack of the buck-toothed jihadists on the Farm and its symbols of power, the towering Twin Mills.
Snowball’s Chance brought criticism from the Orwell estate, as well as other Orwell scholars. However, no legal action was taken, most likely to avoid a Wind Done Gone-style commotion that would only boost the book’s sales.
While Alice Randall didn’t set out to write a parody novel of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, by the time her novel was published, that’s exactly what she’d done – legally, anyway. Randall’s controversial 2001 novel, The Wind Done Gone, was actually written as a “parallel novel,” a book written from the perspective of characters that were otherwise peripheral or unseen in the original. Wind Done Gone tells the story of Scarlett, Rhett, and the rest
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of the characters in Gone with the Wind from the viewpoint of Cynara, a mixed-race slave who was not in the original novel. To help separate the two, Randall never specifically mentions any of the places or characters from Gone with the Wind, but instead has Cynara use nicknames (e.g., “Other” is Scarlett, “R” is Rhett). Furthermore, the book is not a jovial look at Civil War Reconstruction, but actually a fairly serious criticism of this romanticized period in American history.
Still, the Mitchell estate felt the book was too close for comfort and filed a copyright suit in 2001. After a highly publicized courtroom battle, a settlement was reached in 2002. Under the terms, publisher Houghton Mifflin made a donation to historically black college Morehouse and agreed to print a large disclaimer on the front cover saying that the book was an unauthorized parody, to ensure fans of the original novel did not misinterpret it as an official sequel.
The great thing about parody is there’s such a wide range of comedic styles possible. You have your low-brow jokes, like Legolam, but you’ll also find very high-brow comedy, like that in the 1932 novel Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons.
Cold Comfort Farm gets its inspiration from a genre of English novels written primarily in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Known as “loam and lovechild” books, examples include Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and more obscure novels like The House in Dormer Forest by Mary Webb and Sussex Gorse by Sheila Kaye-Smith. These stories revolve around a young, usually outcast, woman who leaves the city to live with relatives in the pastoral countryside. There she meets melodramatic characters whose lives are more intertwined than any you’ll find on a modern-day soap opera. Inevitably, the characters confront tragedy and heartbreak, but find solace in traditional
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values, leading to a spiritual reawakening and, through that, a happy ending.
Fed up with all the doom, gloom, and religion, Gibbons wrote her own version of a “loam and lovechild” by borrowing many of the common traits of the genre and turning them on their ear. Her young, female protagonist, Flora, is a Londoner that moves to the country home of relatives after the death of her parents. There she meets a myriad of eccentric characters, including her Aunt Ada Doom, the coddled matriarch of the farm, who stays secluded in the attic because of “something nasty in the woodshed” that she saw years ago. Flora begins helping her new friends and family find their own version of fulfillment, not by using traditional country values and religion, but by consulting The Higher Common Sense, a handbook of modern age concepts and sound advice.
Although it’s based on books written over 100 years ago, it’s not a requirement that a person read these sources to appreciate the comedy in Cold Comfort Farm In fact, Cold Comfort Farm has been adapted into stage plays, radio serials, and made-for-TV films more often than most other “loam and lovechild” books. In fact, the most famous film version was produced as recently as 1995, starring well-known actors like Kate Beckinsale (Underworld), Rufus Sewell (Dark City), Joanna Lumley (Absolutely Fabulous), Ian McKellan (Lord of the Rings), and Stephen Fry (Jeeves and Wooster).
Dis-Honorable Mention
This is, of course, only a small sampling of the novels out there that are poking fun at best-sellers. Here are a few more that might pique your interest:
