Just learned about the Christian right's response to youtube. It's called godtube.com, with the slogan "BROADCAST HIM," and has got me all excited again about my course "Cultures of the Religious Right" (which I'll be teaching again next Spring). The article I read about it was endlessly amused by this video about the wisdom in God's design of the banana; it seems to just invite a smug Darwinian response about monkeys.
A friend nearly persuaded me that this so deftly invites the Darwinian response because it's a parody - if so like the things it parodies that some of the godtube viewers think it's the real thing! (But wait - a little internet snooping confirms that it is the real thing, a Kiwi named Ray Comfort who's been based - where else - in Southern California since 1989. There is, in fact, a fair amount of parody posted on godtube by self-described atheists, but nothing an compete with unconscious self-parody like this! What was he thinking?)
But parody goes both ways. Consider this ingenious take-off on the Apple/ PC TV ads you've probably seen. (There are others; this is the best.)
I think it's pitch-perfect, showing it "gets" the somewhat nerdy humor of the Apple spots but also that there are more important things in life than computers. If you're cool enough to get this ad, you may be cool enough to be Christian. I can see this parody playing a part in winning someone over. (The idea that you can win someone over through a spirited and spiritual parody of their culture isn't new; Bruce Zuckerman has argued that the Song of Songs may have found its way into the Biblical canon as a parody of a cultural form too powerful - and attractive - to ignore. We not only "get" this cultural form, it says, but are able to raise it to new heights because of our faith - and show its true object.)
The difference between these two video parodies (assuming the first one is a parody!) is that, if you're of the party being parodied, the first one makes you feel stupid while the second might make you feel, well, appreciated. The first one makes you feel hated or ridiculed, the second might make you feel understood and even - well - loved. Satire is generally negative but parody can go both ways, demonstrating a deep understanding motivated by more than condescension or fear. (Of course, if you are converted, the thing may turn around, as analogies do in Aquinas, and you come to see the original secular thing as an unwitting parody - an anticipation - of the religious original!)
Might be fun to let parody (and satire and imitation and cooptation) be a theme for "Cultures of the Religious Right" this next time 'round - not to mention conscious and unconscious self-parody!
