John Tenniel's 1864 illustration for "The Lay of St. Odille" in The Ingoldsby Legends has been called "a very mild and good-natured parody" of his own painting of St. Cecilia (below). In both, the saint rises above the other figures and produces "a spiritual glow". The arc of cherubs replaces the arch with cherubs in St. Cecilia, and the dirt bank replaces a marble pedestal. Also, the fat man at right is taken from a trumpeter in another illustration by Tenniel, for John Milton's "L'Allegro".[1]Tenniel's fresco on John Dryden's "Song for Saint Cecilia's Day", c. 1849
A self-parody is a parody of oneself or one's own work. As an artist accomplishes it by imitating their own characteristics, a self-parody is potentially difficult to distinguish from especially characteristic productions. Self-parody may be used to parody someone else's characteristics, or lacking, by overemphasizing and/or exaggerate one's own. Overemphasis can be made for the prevailing attitude in their life's work, social group, lifestyle and subculture. Including lines and points made by others or by the recipient of the self-parody directing it to a parody of someone else which that other person is likely to remember and can't de-emphasize without frustration.
Sometimes critics use the word figuratively to indicate that the artist's style and preoccupations appear as strongly (and perhaps as ineptly) in some work as they would in a parody. Such works may result from habit, self-indulgence, or an effort to please an audience by providing something familiar. An example from Paul Johnson writing about Ernest Hemingway:
Some [of Hemingway's later writing] was published nonetheless, and was seen to be inferior, even a parody of his earlier work. There were one or two exceptions, notably The Old Man and the Sea, though there was an element of self-parody in that too.[2]
Examples of self-parody
The following are deliberate self-parodies or are at least sometimes considered to be so.
Literature
In One Thousand and One Nights, the fictional storyteller Sheherezade sometimes tells folk tales with similar themes and story lines that can be seen as parodies of each other. For example, "Wardan the Butcher's Adventure With the Lady and the Bear" parallels "The King's Daughter and the Ape", "Harun al-Rashid and the Two Slave-Girls" has a similar relationship to "Harun al-Rashid and the Three Slave-Girls" - and "The Angel of Death With the Proud King and the Devout Man" has two possible parodies: "The Angel of Death and the Rich King" and "The Angel of Death and the King of the Children of Israel".[3] This observation needs to be tempered by our knowledge of the nature of folk tales, and the way this collection "grew" rather than being deliberately compiled.
Edgar Allan Poe often discussed his own work, sometimes in the form of parody, as in "How to Write a Blackwood Article" and the short story that follows it, "A Predicament".
Pale Fire is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov in the form of a long, pedantic, self-centered commentary on a much shorter poem. It may parody his commentary on his translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, in which the commentary was highly detailed and much longer than the poem. Both the poet and the commentator have been called self-parodies.[10]
Arnold Schwarzenegger as Jack Slater in the film Last Action Hero. Slater uses many of Schwarzenegger's action star characterizations including saying one-liners. Schwarzenegger even cameos as himself at the on-screen Slater film premiere.[12][13][14]
^Muir, John Kenneth (March 15, 2013). "From the Archive: The Running Man (1987)". John Kenneth Muir's Reflections on Cult Movies and Classic TV. Retrieved January 6, 2017 – via Blogspot.
