Barry Trotter

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Barry Trotter is a series of Harry Potter parodies written by Michael Gerber. The Harry Potter series are taken as a heavily censored version of the life of Barry Trotter. The story takes place long after the trio have "finished" their education at the Hogwash School of Wizardry and Witchcrap.

The first book in the series is Barry Trotter and the Shameless Parody. It follows Barry Trotter, Lon Measly and Ermine Cringer as they do their best to stop the making of The Movie of the series of books about Barry's school life, written in-universe by J.G. Rollins.

The second book is Barry Trotter and the Unnecessary Sequel, in which Barry becomes headmister of Hogwash after the previous one died.

The third book is Barry Trotter and the Dead Horse, a Prequel within a Sequel, wherein Barry undergoes hypnotherapy to relive the memories of his time at Hogwash in order to find a cure for the arrested youthanasia curse he was afflicted with in the previous book.


The following tropes are common to many or all entries in the Barry Trotter franchise.
For tropes specific to individual installments, visit their respective work pages.
  • You Fail Biology Forever: Lon living with a hole in his head, clean through, and having part of a dogs brain implanted as substitute. But it's a parody and... well...
  • Character Name and the Noun Phrase
  • Deconstructive Parody: Quidit, for one.
  • Equivalent Exchange: The second book mentions this, where everyone has graduated and started families (despite being effectively proven wrong by the final book). It's only then that Barry learns that to summon something with magic is actually just teleportation, and it always comes from somewhere else. This coincidentally results in someone whose possessions always go missing on Barry's birthday, and wind up as his presents and food.
  • Footnote Fever: The books use footnotes to expand one-line jokes in the text into paragraph-long comedic monologues that would otherwise break the flow of the narrative.
  • Go-Karting with Bowser: Valumart attends Barrys birthday party, and is generally friendly towards him and other main characters, having abandoned his quest to kill Barry in exchange for building a media empire.
  • Golden Snitch: Parodied, as catching it gives that team a zillion points, rendering every other aspect of the game completely meaningless.
  • Parody
  • Parody Name: The books contain such winners as "Muddle" for Muggle, "Philosopher's Scone" for Philosopher's Stone, "Hogwash" for Hogwarts, "Lord Valumart" for Lord Voldemort, "Earth Eaters" for Death Eaters and "Measlys" for Weasleys.
  • Post Modernism: The first book. It's a parody which is actually a book about trying to stop a movie which turns out to be said movie which is actually revealed to be a parody of the movie written by the main character who has been watching a movie based loosely off his own life, which involved trying to stop the movie from being made. There's even a disclaimer at the back from the author, claiming that if anyone has worked out what's going on that they are to let him know at once.
  • Predatory Business: As suggested by his name, much of Lord Valumart fits this trope by selling magical goods to the Muddle world.