When does satire (parody) become plagiarism?
Stephen Fry wrote a novel called The Stars’ Tennis Balls, and claimed that only afterwards did he realize he’d rewritten The Count of Monte Cristo.
Fry’s novel is set in modern-day England; Dumas’s is in 1840s France and Italy. I haven’t read either to say what else is similar or different.
My question is, how close of a parody or satire can you write of a copyrighted work before it becomes plaigiarism? How much do you have to change? Where is the line between "that's funny" and "that's theft"?
(I’m not talking about obvious, blunt parody like Bored of the Rings or Spamalot/Monty Python and the Holy Grail, or even Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but more like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.)
This is not the same question as How much is considered plagiarism? because I'm not talking about creating an original, straightforward piece inspired by something else, but rather deliberately copying a specific original with the intent of gently mocking it by updating and changing a few bits. What I'm not sure about is how many bits have to be changed, or to what degree.
1 answer
This is purely my thoughts on this from a literary viewpoint, what I'm saying here could very well be legally wrong, I'm not a lawyer, and not even attempting a legal opinion
While I think this is very strongly a legal question, ultimately you are using somebody else's work in a transformative way. I do think that because of the way that parody law works, you would need to have a solid literary footing. I think the literary merit would be the grounding for any legal or moral response.
If for instance you took The Three Little Pigs, and copied it verbatim and the only change you made was swapping out the Big Bad Wolf for Ernest Hemingway. (so I'd be bad at writing Parody!)
Anyone who reads that would very quickly see what you had changed and, hopefully, realise the purpose for the change (or at the very least find it a little funny)
If you could explain the purpose of the change, ideally complete with the larger social commentary that it encapsulated, then I don't think that would be an issue.
I actually think the question you ask is a little back to front.
I think the less original material you use the harder it is to say it is a parody. If you write a story containing Hannibal Lecter (complete with facemask) as the only excerpt from those stories, it wouldn't be a parody because you've not used enough material.
It needs to contain the story in chief, either as a direct copy or at least a very strong spirit of the story in chief. It needs to be identifiable as the original piece. The reader needs to say "that's 'The Three Little Pigs' with Ernest Hemingway as the wolf" instead of "what's Ernest Hemingway doing blowing down houses, and what's with the pigs"
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/20013. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
0 comment threads
0 comment threads