Pastiche and Parody

Pastiche And Parody 

Pastiche

Unlike a parody, which aims for a comic or satiric effect, a pastiche is often intended as a compliment (or an homage) to the original writer though it may just be a collection of borrowed words and ideas.

Pastiche is a serious version of what a parody is, it intends to pay tribute to the original text in a sense. Pastiche follows the post-modern root in saying 'Nothing is new'. Pastiche is really common in our society and has been implanted into many things typically music videos and films. Pastiche is shown in the likes of Frank Zappa' s Cruisin' With Ruben And The Jets is both a pastiche of and a homage to 1950s doowop also Quentin Tarantino's films are generally pastiches of their respective genres. 

Michael Jackson's "Thriller" is a mini horror movie; a breakthrough in an era when most videos were just montages of show footage, cheesy editing, and stock footage of explosions and horses running through fog. This video doesn't just mimic another video, but a whole filmmaking style. These examples are different in the text they come from, but they can also be put into the same category for the ideas that they portray where they have taken something that is serious and made it serious in their own way. To summarize pastiche it is a text that borrows or imitates the style, words, or ideas of other writers.

Parody 

A parody is a work that imitates another work in order to ridicule, ironically comment on, or poke some affectionate fun at the work itself, the subject of the work, the author or fictional voice of the parody, or another subject. 

Parody is a way of being able to mock and make fun of something whilst making it funny for the audience. A good example of this would be Airplane!, By the 1980s audiences had got a bit tired of being miserable watching disaster movies, and then Airplane! The film was a aircraft disaster movie. It parodied all the cliches: food poisoning, singing nuns, maudlin alcoholics, flashbacks, love lost, love regained, passengers with remorse, passengers who find repentance. It was impossible to make an aircraft disaster movie after Airplane! because no one would take it seriously. Since this Parody has became its own genre in today's cinema. A example of a music video using Parody is 



 This explains the theory that there is no longer individuality because everything that is considered to be 'new' has taken ideas from something that already exists. This also backs up the Post-Modernism theory