Before delving into the main topic of this website (parodies of Alice in Wonderland), I think its important to take a broader look at parody of children’s stories in general first. Making parodies of children’s novels, usually marketed towards adults, seems to have suddenly become a very popular thing. Browsing through the Humour section at Chapters I found parody upon parody of the books familiar to me as a child. From parodies of the well beloved books such as Dr. Seuss’ Oh the Places You’ll Go (lovingly changed to Oh the Places You’ll Eff Up) to more general parody pastiches of the various children’s tales many 90’s kids grew up with (like those found in Alice in Tumblerland which details characters such as Peter Pan, Alice, and Donald Duck confronting young adulthood) parodies of childhood stories re-vamped for their adult audiences lined the shelved.
If my research at RBSC has taught me anything though, it’s that this is hardly a new trend. Parodies of children’s stories has been going on for a long time, and is perhaps seeing a resurgence now because the kids who were growing up with stories such as Dr. Seuss are now at an age where reliving those familiar stories through a new lens is possible.
My question is, though, why choose this particular format? Why use something written for children, as the referent material for a parody? In the previous section (Parody in General) I outlined that parodies will often invert the expected moral compass of a work for humour’s sake. This would seem to make the innocent, cherished, stories of childhood a prime target for inversion. This provides one explanation. Another argument I hope to strengthen through my analysis of texts in the Alice in Wonderland and Parody section, is that through the use of children’s stories which everyone grew up familiar with, there is an already established world and characters. This allows authors to by-pass most of the world-building stage of a story and move straight into their own take on the story.
Perhaps, then, children’s stories are such an easy and common target for adult parody because of their familiarity and innocence. This certainly seems to be the case with the modern day examples I found in Chapters—Oh the Places You’ll Eff Up is an irreverent take on the life struggles of young adults, complete with crude language and questionable morals. This acts as a humorous representation of a common life experience through a well known framework of the Dr. Seuss original story, making it all the more relatable.
In the next page—Alice in Wonderland and Parody—I will delve deeper into the examples of this type of parody which can be found in RBSC, focusing specifically on parodies of Alice in Wonderland. Click on through the main subject header, and into the world of Alice in Parody-land.