Usually. But how many of these send-ups get sung more than once? Damned few, and for good reason. There's a wide gap between the average send-up and those few that have taken on a life of their own. My favorite of these is Frank Hayes' song Don't Ask. It skewers Al Franks The Green Hills of Harmony with great enthusiasm.
Let's look at some of the originals and send-ups, and talk about what separates the one-shots from the perennials.
That's fine, but it's not parody. It's just laziness for folks who can't write their own melodies. Parody doesn't just rip off the melody line, it rips off the subject in creative ways. Consider the opening verse from Michael Longcor's I Like To Watch You Walk[1] and what Steve Macdonald and I did with it for I Like To Watch You Caulk:
| Line | Rhyme | I Like To Watch You Walk | I Like To Watch You Caulk | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A | You're a modern kind of woman | You're the sexy kind of he-man | |
| 2 | B | On that we both agree, | I've been looking for for years, | |
| 3 | C | With a black belt in Karate | With a belly like a washboard | |
| 4 | B | And a PhD degree. | But a gap between your ears. | |
| 5 | D | I know you're not an object | You got hammers in your tool belt, | |
| 6 | E | I know you're not a toy | A paste gun in your hands, | |
| 7 | F | I don't want to offend you, | And an IQ that is challenged | |
| 8 | E | And I don't want to annoy | By a box of Raisin Bran | |
| 9 | G | But I like to watch you walk... | But I like to watch you caulk... |
Our send-up works both as parody and as standalone. Let's look first at the parody mechanisms.
We rely very heavily on reversal in the parody. With the first line we reverse the sex of the person being spoken of, and presumably the sex of the speaker as well. In the second makes the object of desire one-dimensional rather that well-rounded. In lines 3-6, we list the attributes of the object, again with parallelism and ironic reversal. The `washboard' in belly refers not just to the musculature, but is also something you'd never ask a modern woman to use. She's not an object, he uses objects. She's not a toy, she plays with toys[2].
When you write a parody, you are usually assuming the listener is familiar with the original. The means the listener has already internalized the rhyme scheme and is being drawn in to the parallelism. As soon as he realizes it parody, his mind starts racing ahead trying to figure out what the punch lines are going to be. Since in this case we following the original rhyme scheme closely, he's clued in that there's probably going to be a punch line very close to `I like to watch you walk.' So we string him out as far as possible, changing only one phoneme in the last word but preserving a rhyme with the original.
Note, though, that we have not telegraphed it. While the listener expects rhyme in songs, there is no internal rhyme with `walk' (or `caulk') in either song! Instead, we rely on our duplication of the original rhyme scheme to make the listener expect something strongly parallel. We give it to him, but make him wait until the last instant.
One narrative problem with the song is the word `caulk'. It's not your everyday word. When Steve Macdonald first mentioned the song idea to me, he had little more than the line `I like to watch you caulk', and an image[3]. Had to repeat the line several times before I understood the word `caulk.'
A punch line the user can't understand isn't much use. So we decided to help the listener along by mentioning a paste gun. Now the listener has built a mental picture of this hunk in T-shirt and blue jeans, holding a paste (caulk) gun in his hands. With this image, everybody gets the word right immediately. Yes, we do some vocal emphasis and enunciation as well - but pre-loading the idea seems to be the most important part.
We've been very pleasantly surprised to find that I Like To Watch You Caulk works well even on listeners who've not heard the original. By adhering so closely to Longcors original structure (which is darned good) and poking gentle fun at the idea of The Modern Conflicted Woman as sexual predator, we came up with a song wherein the humor does not intrinsicly rely on knowing the original material. Mind you, it's funnier if you know the original - but you don't have to know the original to appreciate the parody.
There are those who consider the Irregulars to be somewhat self-important[2]. Frank Hayes is one of them. He leapt on The Green Hills of Harmony, and came up with Don't Ask. It neatly skewers the original by turning the excessive nobility of the song in a wildly funny collection of all-too-human venality. It proved wildly popular, not just with the regular crowds at the filksings but with the Dorsai Irregulars themselves[3]. Here is the first verse of each:
| Line | The Green Hills of Harmony | Don't Ask | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Oh, the sergeant is saddened. | The orders come down | |
| 2 | The piper is fey. | And they march us away. | |
| 3 | There's no Dorsai whiskey | There's a battle to fight, | |
| 4 | They're havin' today. | And we join in the fray. | |
| 5 | The skies to the westward | Ghod, it's hell when you know | |
| 6 | Are clouded and grey | This could be your last day | |
| 7 | And all of the soldiers are leavin'. | But it's better than working for Xerox. | |
| Chorus: | Chorus: | ||
| C1 | And it's march, march, down to the landing | So March, March, April, May, June, July, | |
| C2 | And sit on your packs | August, September, | |
| C3 | While the ferry's away. | We'll fight every day. | |
| C4 | And it's fare ye well | And it's fare-thee-well | |
| C5 | Ye green hills of modesty | All vestige of harmony | |
| C6 | All the poor soldiers are leaving. | All of the Dorsai are singing. |
Frank took a very different tack from Steve and I. Rather than stay as parallel as possible to the original, Frank went back to the real original, Farewell tae th' Creeks. He restored some of the original melody (Al Frank had been quite free with changes), reminding all those who took Green Hills too seriously that it was a stolen melody and theme.
Then he ran his razored tongue over the Irregulars[4]. The song is rife with deadly accurate digs at the DI. Bob Asprin founded the Irregulars while working at Xerox (line 7). The Irregulars are well-known of their singing, but close harmony is not one of their strong points[5].
Structurally, Frank varied quite a bit from the original. This works well, because his target is not so much the original song but the group which produced and popularized it. The listener who is unfamiliar with the Irregulars is neither more nor less lost without the parallelism, and its removal allows Frank to vary as he need to in order to make his jokes work.
But that's not to say Frank completely abandoned the parallelism. He very cleverly begins by paralleling the themes until sucker-punching you with the 7th line, then sucks you back into parallel expectations twice: the first time with the `March March' (line C1) that turns into a month list, the second time by duplicating C4 and re-using the last word of C5 in a neat double entendre. Frank continue this pattern in later choruses, with each C5 chorus line leaving out a different quality and each C6 showing the result.
Considered as songwriting, Don't Ask is probably a better piece of work than I Like To Watch You Caulk. It's a bit subtler, it improves musically on the original, and it is much less likely to go for the low-brow sexual humor. On the other hand, it doesn't stand alone nearly as well. If you don't know about folks being skewered, much of the humor is diminished if not gone.
All of this post-hoc analysis may be interesting, but do songwriters really think about this when they sit down to write?
Well, yes and no. I can't speak for Frank, but I can speak for myself and to a lesser extent for Steve Macdonald. As Steve and I were writing Caulk, we talked through many of the lines. We decided what variants to keep, what to pitch, what to move around and what to modify. And when we decided (I won't say argued, because we didn't) on what was better or worse, we were applying the same rules you see above.
Yes, inspiration[1] was our lead. But even inspiration falls under Sturgeon's Law[2]. Looking back at our discussions and decisions, we often explicitly said one or more of the things stated above. We didn't have those rules conciously in mind as we were writing, but they were critical in evaluating what we had done and in rewriting.
And if you're not evaluating and rewriting, you're probably not writing good parody.