The Dialogics of Post-Literary Adaptation: YouTube Parodies

In this essay I propose to look at YouTube parodies in relation to the changing dialogics of post-literary adaptation, situating them within their new media context, and exploring how technological advances have transformed the landscape of post-modern texts in the ways that they are produced, consumed, and, most significantly, in the ways that transtextual relationships have evolved in parallel with changing digital technologies. Whilst the term ‘dialogic’ traditionally relates to the communicative interaction between classical literary texts, in ‘Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation’, Robert Stam uses it in his discussion of filmic adaptations of literary works, positing cinematic ‘adaptation as intertextual dialogism’ (Stam, 2000: 64).  I intend to modernise this discussion further, looking specifically at contemporary intertextual dialogues that are at play in new media discourses.

After its acquisition by Google in 2006, YouTube rapidly became the video-sharing platform to watch, ‘quickly outperform[ing] rivals … in its ability to attract and distribute content’ (Snickars and Vonderau, 2009: 10). As Snickars and Vonderau comment, ‘YouTube in fact made the term “platform” what it has become … a cultural intermediary [that] has fundamentally shaped public discourse over the past few years’ (Snickars and Vonderau, 2009: 10). With now more than one billion unique users each month (YouTube, ‘Statistics’), and with ‘over 6 billion hours of video [being] watched each month on YouTube—that's almost an hour for every person on Earth’ (YouTube, ‘Statistics’), YouTube, I contend, is an example of the ubiquitous presence of online digital media in our current climate. A platform which is ‘both industry and user driven’ (Snickars and Vonderau, 2009: 11), it invites everyday users to create and circulate content, and exemplifies the ‘participatory culture’ (Jenkins, 2006: Introduction) that characterises the Web 2.0 era. According to Jenkins, ‘participatory culture [has] emerge[d] as the culture absorbs and responds to the explosion of new media technologies that makes it possible for average consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways’ (Jenkins, ‘Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture’, 2006). As technological advances have opened up these opportunities for ‘average consumers’ to interact with, create, and share content, consumers have, in turn, increasingly become ‘prosumers’ (defined in the Oxford English Dictionary online as ‘a consumer who becomes involved with designing or customizing products for their own needs’ (Oxford University Press, 2013)); in this way, the hierarchical distinctions between producer and consumer are broken down as they co-exist in the same online space where both hold the power to reach and influence the public. In their article ‘Is YouTube truly the future?’ Jenkins and Hartley draw attention to how YouTube epitomises this change:

 ‘While most people can read, very few publish in print. Hence active contribution to science, journalism and even fictional storytelling has been restricted to expert elites, while most of the general population makes do with ready-made entertainment. But the Internet does not distinguish between literacy and publication. So now we are entering a new kind of digital literacy, where everyone is a publisher and whole populations have the chance to contribute as well as consume.’ (Jenkins and Hartley, 2008)

Whilst online media platforms have certainly enabled people to interact with, and produce texts in new ways, the intertextual play that can be seen through parodic web videos is nothing new in itself. In his work, Stam refers to how film adaptations are caught up in an ongoing process of ‘intertextual reference and transformation, of texts generating other texts in an endless process of recycling, transformation, and transmutation’ (Stam, 2000: 66). Whilst textual reworkings are a fundamental feature of the post-modern ‘age of cultural recycling’ (Hutcheon, 2006: 3) of which we are arguably a part today, stories have always arisen from other sources, and been subject to retelling in different ways. Sixteenth century jesters, for example, would commonly tell jokes and tales based on other literary sources or real events in order to entertain in English courts. As Linda Hutcheon notes, ‘Western culture [has a] long and happy history of borrowing and stealing, or, more accurately, sharing stories’ (Hutcheon, 2006: 5). It is through the process of the original texts being made ‘suitable for a new use or purpose’ (Oxford English Dictionary online) that they then become ‘adaptations’, ‘a derivation that is not derivative- a work that is second without being secondary… its own palimpsestic thing’ (Hutcheon, 2006: 9).

The inter-relationship of texts inevitably evolves in parallel with the type of texts that come into existence. Online videos, alongside the film adaptations to which Stam refers, then, are ‘post-literary texts’, denoting the shift from ‘a single-track’, uniquely verbal medium such as the novel, which “has only words to play with,” to a multi-track medium’ (Stam, 2000: 56). As products of their time, they address a post-modern, media-literate viewer, one that has knowledge of contemporary codes and conventions and is aware of the cultural specifities the texts are referencing. Sturken and Cartwright describe how:

‘The postmodern condition and postmodern style define a context in which consumerism is integrated into life and identity in complex ways. Thus one of the primary aspects of postmodernism is that it entails a reflexive recognition of our lived relation within the world at the level of consumption, branding, images, media, and the popular. Appropriation, parody, pastiche, and self-conscious nostalgic play are just some of the approaches associated with postmodernism’ (Sturken and Cartwright, 2009: 314)

Whilst post-modernism, defined by theorist Frederic Jameson as the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’ (Jameson, 1991), tends to be seen as hand-in-hand with the political and economic nature of globalisation, it is also used in reference to a set of styles developed in this period. For the purposes of this essay, and as mentioned previously, I will focus my discussion on one such postmodern stylistic device, that of the parody. As ‘an imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist, or genre with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect’ (Oxford University Press, 2013), a parody is, at its core, an adaptation. Thus, as Stam posits film adaptations as ‘intertextual dialogism’, I posit video parodies as an example of popular ‘intertextual dialogism’ in the digital media landscape of today’s Web 2.0 era.

A parody is a work that makes ‘culturally specific references’ with the intention of ‘provid[ing] pleasure to audiences who enjoy mapping links between different texts and recognizing when texts are referencing each other’ (Jenkins et al., 2013: 208). Hence, in a society where the cult of celebrity is universally prevalent, it is perhaps unsurprising that the majority of online parodies reference popular culture; especially as, in fact, popular culture has been a reference point for comedic musings long before the advent of online technologies. British culture, for example, saw a satire boom in the 1960s, with the staging of plays such as Beyond the Fringe (1960) and television comedies such as That Was the Week That Was (BBC, 1962-3), which famously mocked socio-political figures. Where the juxtaposition does lie between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, perhaps, is in how digital media has initiated a trend towards the production of comedic content in response to the set of practices that have emerged as a result of the latter. Whilst events, brands, films and stars (to name just a few) remain a common target for parodies, so too are the social media platforms that are now inseparable from popular culture, and with it, their users. From social media platforms arise new texts that can be re-worked, recycled, and adapted, and a new set of consumer (or prosumer) practices that can be referenced. 

A recent series of YouTube videos made by comedy troupe Dead Parrot (the name which seemingly references the famous sketch in Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969-1974)) illustrates just this. In their Comment Reconstruction series they parody the comments by YouTube users themselves, employing two older male thespians (Grahame Edwards and Eryl Lloyd Parry) to re-enact conversations that have taken place on the site. The videos are shot in black and white and from their pre-title font to the mise-en-scène they are stylistically reminiscent of serious documentaries. However, they are simultaneously self-reflexive in nature. Dead Parrot’s first and most popular video, ‘YouTube Comment Reconstruction #1’ (YouTube, 2013) (which had over two million views in under two months), is based on the conversation, or rather argument, between One Direction fans ‘Sophie Danze’ and ‘Jilianlovesthebiebs’ on the YouTube video ‘One Direction: What Makes You Beautiful’. When one of them asserts, “I have proof that Harry is gay”, she provokes another fan to respond, “You’re a shit-faced liar … You’re just a Direction-hater” (they then continue to trade further insults). The fan-girls’ comments are accentuated through their transposition to the dramatised video, and become even more comical in their new setting, where the audience can derive pleasure from both the references within the comments themselves (as well as their slang-littered attempts at articulating their points), and from the ways in which they are being re-told (for example, by well-spoken gentlemen).

In his work on post-literary adaptations, Thomas Leitch draws attention to the ‘tendency away from using novels as sources’ (Leitch, 2007: Chapter 11). YouTube comedian Steve Kardynal (username SteveKardynal), similarly to Dead Parrot, produces parodies which originate from post-literary sources and which make reference to celebrities and social media rather than to classical literary texts. Kardynal’s series of Chatroulette videos feature him mimicking various pop stars (he mimes as their song plays in the background) on the online chat website of the same name, where users interact with each other via webcam. The humour in the videos derives not only from Kardynal’s parodies of the stars, but also from seeing the user’s reactions to his performances. Following public controversy over the singer Miley Cyrus’ provocative performances of her song ‘Wrecking Ball’ at the MTV awards, a proliferation of parodies mimicking her emerged on YouTube (an example of how real-life events are frequently used as sources for online comedy videos). Steve Kardynal’s Chatroulette parody of ‘Wrecking Ball’, uploaded in November 2013, was the most successful of these. An instantaneous YouTube hit, it immediately went viral, and received more views than the videos of the original performances. The parody’s success played a significant part in reinvigorating the original song, drawing audiences back to it, which resulted in it rising back up the music charts to the number one spot. This, it would seem, illustrates Leitch’s assertion that ‘the most important twist postliterary adaptations have added... is the ability of adaptations to return the favour by selling their originals in quantity, sending players and visitors back to the original’ (Leitch, 2007: 278).

Like Dead Parrot’s Comment Reconstruction series, the humour in Kardynal’s Chatroulette videos is a result of his engagement with multiple texts. Not only does he parody stars, but also the social media platform he is using in his performances; Chatroulette is renowned for having had explicit and inappropriate content emerge on-site in the past, and Kardynal plays upon its seedy reputation in the way that he dresses during the performances (or rather, undresses, at one point in the ‘Wrecking Ball’ video). Chatroulette and YouTube are not the only social media networks subject to video parodies. In CollegeHumor’s YouTube channel, their video spoof using a re-worked version of the Nickleback song ‘Photograph’ parodies the stereotypical user of photo-sharing application Instagram, whilst Indy Mogul’s ‘Twitter Movie Trailer’ (2010) stylistically imitates ‘The Social Network Official Trailer’ (2010) in order to poke fun at both Twitter and the filmic dramatisation of Facebook’s startup in The Social Network (Fincher, 2010). These are just some of the most popular examples amongst a multiplicity of parodies on YouTube that serve to highlight how the forms of intertextual dialogism have changed as a result of new media discourses. They are, I would argue, indicative of the shift towards what Lessig terms a ‘remix culture’, which, in contrast to a ‘Read-Only’ (RO) culture (‘more comfortable … with simple consumption’ (Lessig 2008: 28) embraces processes of post-literary adaptation for creative purposes. As Lessig argues, ‘remixed media succeed when they show others something new … Like a great essay or a funny joke, a remix draws upon the work of others in order to do new work. It is great writing without words. It is creativity supported by a new technology’ (Lessig, 2009: 82). Social media, as I have noted previously, is integrated into daily life in such a way that it is now part of our culture. As art, music, myths and even other forms of literature were reference points for classical novelists, social media has become a meaningful cultural reference point for today’s post-literary creators. Consequently, the trend towards parodies referencing social media platforms and their users seems to be a natural progression. As Sturken and Cartwright argue:

‘We could say that the rise of remix culture is the result of shifting postmodern sensibilities coupled with the emergence of a set of technological practices enabled by the Web and digital technology. This means that remix and remake culture are not only evidence of new kinds of cultural and consumer practices but are also integrated into new concepts of identity and agency.' (Sturken, Cartwright, 2009: 314)

The virality of popular YouTube parodies (the ways in which they spread rapidly on online platforms) suggests that audiences continue to respond to comedic adaptations that they enjoy as they have done for centuries, with a desire to share them with others and pass them on. The touchstone for what is funny, however, is culturally specific. Although YouTube as an online platform makes web videos easily accessible to the masses, there is no guarantee that the content will translate well on a universal scale. Nonetheless, the parody’s value remains; as Jenkins et al. state, ‘while all humor builds on whether an audience “gets” the joke or shares a sensibility, parody combines that aspect of humor with a specific shared reference. This is precisely what makes parody valuable – it can express shared experiences and, especially when it plays on nostalgic references, a shared history’ (Jenkins et al. 2013: 207). The YouTube parody, then, functions as a palimpsestic text: one that first announces its interaction with other texts and second, through its intertextual dialogism, becomes a new, multi-layered sum of its textual interactions, one that is reflective of the postmodern, postliterary, participatory and remix culture of which it is a part, and one which exemplifies the set of contemporary intertextual dialogues that are at play in new media discourses.

Written by Pippa Selby

Copywright © 2013 Pippa Selby

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