Why are porn parodies so darn popular at the moment?
Likely because they present something familiar and comforting to us in trying economic times. Likely because we’ve been jaded by insta-porn and grainy webchat stroke sessions and want to be entertained while we masturbate every now and then. Likely because a higher percentage of women are welcoming some kind of porn into their marriages and relationships, and parodies are less threatening to them. Likely because husbands in America want their wives to watch porn with them and figure parodies are less threatening to their wives. And likely because there’s a whole untapped market of the show’s original fans who will make the porn parody of the show their first – but not last – porn purchase.
Parodies are fun. Fans can watch their favorite characters indulge in the fantasies they constructed for themselves around the original shows. Want to watch Bailey get balled on WKRP? See Scully and Mulder finally hook up on The X Files? Watch Genie give her Master a masterful screw? Watch Lucy take Ricky’s thick Cuban cock in her ass? See the Friends get friendly? Watch Elaine find a dude spongeworthy? All those secret fantasies come to life in porn parody.
Eventually, the cycle will turn and the impetus to make parodies will go back into the closet. Already there are parody “stretches” – including the Who’s Nailin’ Paylin franchise that blew the lid off of the genre most recently. (Sarah Palin is a public figure, after all, not a sit-com. No, really. She isn’t scripted. She doesn’t have a team of writers making up the stuff that comes out of her mouth. Really, I promise. I mean, she can’t, right?) As the “good ones” get taken by various studios, producers are reaching outside of the traditional parody box for material. Consider TMSleaze, a spoof of the celebrity gossip show, or This Ain’t Monday Night Football. (I mean, a sportscast? But it’s got cheerleaders, so I guess it’s okay . . .) They’re spoofing reality shows (This Ain’t Jersey Shore, This Ain’t Hell’s Kitchen, This Ain’t Ghost Hunters) and celebrity scandals (Tiger Woods, Letterman’s Nailin’ Palin) as well as movies and TV shows. And they’re even spoofing movies about people trying to make it big by making a porno parody (Kayden and Rocco Make A Porno).
But there is plenty of fertile territory left out there. Just yesterday I heard that a Gone With The Wind parody is in the works, and one that will make my brother happy, The Big Lebowski. Hustler is ambitiously attempting to make a 3-D Avatar parody. But that brings us to another aspect of this phenomenon: the possibility of “cult” parodies. While Star Trek and X-Files and Friends certainly had their cultish sides, there are plenty of parodies that would attract an instant audience of die-hard fans just for the novelty. The True Blood parody, Tru, was just released and is promising. Fans are dying (and resurrecting) to see the forthcoming Buffy The Vampire Slayer parody from New Sensations.
So how long will I have to wait for a Spartacus: Blood and Sandparody? I’ll even endure (and perhaps secretly enjoy but I’d never admit it) a couple of good openly gay gladiator scenes for the privilege. Hercules and Xena, Warrior Princess are ripe for the plucking, as are cult sci-fi classics like Alien and Blade Runner.
And when will I see a parody of Angel, or, better yet, Firefly/Serenity? It’s got a freaking whore in the cast and everyone looks yummy. There was someone getting laid on that ship nearly every week. I’m sure the loyal Browncoat community would buy it.
Wouldn’t you, guys?
This has been really interesting reading. I've been trying to find information on porn parodies for a paper I'm hoping to present at a conference on erotic adaptations, though typing 'porn parody' into Google doesn't really come up with that many scholarly articles! I've been trying to establish how we define porn parody though. As you say many of the recent porn parody films actually pay great attention to detail, have scripts that could have come straight from the shows they are parodying and employ actors with at least some passing resemblance to the original actors, which makes these almost XXX re-imaginings of the shows, rather than porn parodies. I was wondering if you have any thoughts on that, or links to sites/articles/etc. that may be of use to me?
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