Pastiche

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

A pastiche imitates a Genre or body of work in the same way a Parody imitates a particular work. Various elements will be mixed and matched, some emphasised, some downplayed, in the hope of creating something funny.

Pastiche is generally considered the gentlest form of comedy, as it is almost impossible to create a pastiche of something one does not enjoy.

The key difference between a parody and a pastiche is that a parody imitates one or two specific works, while a pastiche imitates several related works. However, it is entirely possible for something to be both a pastiche and a parody - Scary Movie, for example, is a parody of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, and a pastiche of Horror movies in general.

See also Musical Pastiche. Compare Satire, Parody, Farce.

Examples of Pastiche include:

Anime and Manga

Comic Books

Fan Works

Film

Literature

Live-Action TV

Music

Music

  • About half of "Weird Al" Yankovic's songs are pastiches. Most of them are not, in fact, parodies of the songs they pastiche, as, though they often satirize various aspects of society or parody other works, they don't make any point about the original.
    • ... but not all. "Smells Like Nirvana", for instance, directly tweaks the reputation for unintelligibility of "Smells Like Teen Spirit", while "Six Words Long" implicitly jibes George Harrison's (and before him, James Ray) "Got My Mind Set On You" for its simplicity. And "Achy Breaky Song" ("Don't play that song, that achy-breaky song") is more or less transparent—at least, for those of us who remember how overplayed it was in The Nineties.
    • "Don't Download This Song" is an example of Weird Al doing satire. Made even funnier due to the fact that it was offered as a free download on many sites. Including his own.
    • Many of his original songs imitate the style of certain artists, eg "Dare to Be Stupid" is a pastiche of Devo.
  • On the other hand, the songs on the Homestar Runner album Strong Bad Sings and Other Type Hits almost all parody the genres they pastiche. For instance, lyrics like "Darkness... the fate of the world!" in "Moving Very Slowly" parody the overblown epic tone of much death metal, while "Circles" is one big bash on the typical college blues band.

Video Games

Web Original