ABSTRACT
Television critical intertextuality can take many forms, ranging from television criticism and reviews, to ads or previews that compare and contrast one program to another, to the popular and academic press’ growing catalogue of television studies. The role and relative success of these texts in criticizing and/or attacking others has gone largely understudied, but given that popular television criticism is nowhere near as well developed, robust, or seriously utilized as literary, film, and art criticism; given the predominantly superficial hit-and-run nature of ad/preview ‘criticism’; and given that the audience for academic work on television is diminutive proportional to the television audience itself, these forms rarely amount to a popularly available and prevalent critique. Rather, critical intertextuality’s crown form exists in parody. With a long and venerable history, parody has proven popular throughout the course of art and literature in multiple societies. As Bakhtin writes, ‘there never was a single strictly straightforward genre, no single type of direct discourse – artistic, rhetorical, philosophical, religious, ordinary everyday – that did not have its own parodying and travestying double, its own comic-ironic contre-partie’ (1981: 53). From the ‘fourth drama’ or satyr play of Greek theatre, to Alexander Pope’s ‘Rape of the Lock,’ to its modern televisual form, parody’s ability to intertextually toy with the grammar of genre has assured its continued relevance and popularity over the ages. It has also seen it remain a powerful tool for revealing the absurdities within specific genres, and for teaching and testing genre literacy. Parody attaches itself to generic discourses and either 44playfully or scornfully attacks them, aiming to destabilize the common sense of genre, and intertextually chip away at already-read and yet-to-be-read texts.
