Satire vs. Parody

Main Difference

The main difference between Satire and Parody is that the Satire is a genre of arts and literature in the form of humor or ridicule and Parody is a imitative work created to mock, comment on or trivialise an original work.

• Satire

  In fiction and less frequently in non-fiction, satire is a genre of literature and performing arts, in which vices, follies, abuses and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, corporations, government, or society itself into improvement. Although satire is usually meant to be humorous, its greater purpose is often constructive social criticism, using wit to draw attention to both particular and wider issues in society.

  A feature of satire is strong irony or sarcasm—”in satire, irony is militant”—but parody, burlesque, exaggeration, juxtaposition, comparison, analogy, and double entendre are all frequently used in satirical speech and writing. This “militant” irony or sarcasm often professes to approve of (or at least accept as natural) the very things the satirist wishes to question.

  Satire is nowadays found in many artistic forms of expression, including internet memes, literature, plays, commentary, television shows, and media such as lyrics.

• Parody

  A parody (); also called a spoof, send-up, take-off, lampoon, play on (something), caricature, or joke, is a work created to imitate, make fun of, or comment on an original work—its subject, author, style, or some other target—by means of satiric or ironic imitation. As the literary theorist Linda Hutcheon puts it, “parody … is imitation, not always at the expense of the parodied text.” Another critic, Simon Dentith, defines parody as “any cultural practice which provides a relatively polemical allusive imitation of another cultural production or practice”.

  Parody may be found in art or culture, including literature, music (although “parody” in music has an earlier, somewhat different meaning than for other art forms), animation, gaming, and film.

  The writer and critic John Gross observes in his Oxford Book of Parodies, that parody seems to flourish on territory somewhere between pastiche (“a composition in another artist’s manner, without satirical intent”) and burlesque (which “fools around with the material of high literature and adapts it to low ends”). Meanwhile, the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot distinguishes between the parody and the burlesque, “A good parody is a fine amusement, capable of amusing and instructing the most sensible and polished minds; the burlesque is a miserable buffoonery which can only please the populace.” Historically, when a formula grows tired, as in the case of the moralistic melodramas in the 1910s, it retains value only as a parody, as demonstrated by the Buster Keaton shorts that mocked that genre.