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“You wanna play psycho killer? Can I be the helpless victim? No, please don’t kill me Mr. Ghostface, I wanna be in the sequel!”

Welcome to another Screenscope Blog entry.

An unhinged quote for an unhinged genre. ‘Scary Movie’ has been announced for a 2026 revival and this means the return of the spoof genre, which I am intrigued to see. I don’t know if many people know about spoofs, but they deserve to be common knowledge. With a lack of satisfaction from the dictionary, here is my definition:

Spoof: a movie that absurdly imitates tropes, themes and genres of other works, using tools such as misdirection, misunderstandings, popular culture references and slapstick humour to mock or satirise its inspirations.

These films aren’t well known because they typically don’t do well in the box office, but maybe you have heard of ‘Dance Flick’? ‘Naked Gun’? ‘Airplane!’? ‘Fifty Shades of Black’? Or maybe not.

All of these span different eras of the spoof, but they all share a common thread of bending the reality of other works towards the ridiculous. Many consider the first spoof to be ‘The Little Train Robbery’ (1905), which is inspired by ‘The Great Train Robbery’ (1903). Made by the same director, the movie has children on miniature sets instead of adults and leans on exaggerated physical comedy. However, I would argue that this is more of a parody than a spoof – a very thin line that’s been a struggle to distinguish but I’ll try to explain. 

Movies like ‘The Little Train Robbery’, ‘Shrek’ and ‘Shaun of the Dead’ are more parodies than spoofs because even though they twist subjects and play with tropes from other stories, spoofs are more exaggerated, overly silly and explicit. ‘Shrek’ can’t be called a spoof – I won’t allow it. Although spoofs and parodies can overlap, they are different in tone, with spoofs being more slapstick with a lack of deep characters to root for and/or wholesome content. Almost every spoof should be 18+, with the creators putting scenes in that will leave people saying:

 “But, why though?”

For those who want an example, here is a clip from ‘Dance Flick’. Be extremely advised, spoofs are not afraid of juvenile and gross-out comedy. It’s inappropriate but film history nonetheless.

1920-1980

Spoofs have been a concept since cinema started, really. Early screen stars like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton made exaggerated comedies that critiqued regimes, wars and classes, however, it took famous comedy duos like Laurel and Hardy in the 1920s and Abbott and Costello in the 1940s to give spoofs a specific form. In ‘Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein’ (1948), they spoofed popular monster movies by bringing together Count Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolf Man to tell an absurd story. But, they weren’t really making fun of the original works, it was more of them using the tropes as a vehicle to show that the duos were funny. Carry On films did something similar in Britain, as some of their movies were a bit ‘spoofy’.

“Tunrayo, what are Carry On films?” 

Great question. Elated that you asked. Here’s the link to see!

I would suggest the more familiar spoofs came from actor and filmmaker, Mel Brooks. He made ‘Young Frankenstein’ to satirise monster movies, ’Silent Movie’ to commemorate the black and white era and ‘Spaceballs’ to spoof sci-fi films like ‘Star Wars’ and ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ to name only a few. However, Brooks also used his spoofs to tackle deeper societal issues. In ‘Blazing Saddles’ (1974), he spoofed westerns, putting a black cowboy at the centre to address racism. He believed his work was always rooted in something important; he describes how there was “an engine underneath the comedy that says something” for each story. Sometimes, his humour went too far, as many spoofs do, but without that anchor to bring the movie back down to reality, a spoof is floating in the wind with no clear direction. 

1980-2000

In the 1980s, American filmmaking trio Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker (ZAZ) pioneered spoofs with ‘Airplane!’ (1980) , which is a spoof of disaster movies, (particularly the film ‘Zero Hour!’ which they sometimes replicate shot-for-shot) and ‘The Naked Gun’ franchise (1988-1994) that spoofed crime films. Unlike Mel Brooks, ZAZ’s movies had less social commentary and were more absurd with random occurrences and deadpan delivery of outlandish lines. One of the Zucker’s said that he didn’t want to make a point through his movies, he just wanted to make people laugh. However, the characters still gave the movies some intelligence and depth.

2000 – present

As we entered the 21st century, we had spoofs like ‘Not Another Teen Movie’ and the Wayans Brothers entries, ‘Scary Movie’ franchise and ‘Dance Flick’. These were also mocking, hypersexual and risqué, but somehow, still maintained some thought out humour. Other spoofs didn’t fare as well.

Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer are spoof filmmakers that rose to popularity after allegedly contributing to ‘Scary Movie’. Following this, they did ‘Epic Movie’, ‘Date Movie’, ‘Disaster Movie’ and more. Long story short, these films were not well received. They relied heavily on random pop culture references, maliciously targeting celebrities, and the storylines that were not storylining. Friedberg and Seltzer seemed more focused on instant gratification for their movies rather than longevity. Their spoofs leaned heavily on toilet humour, probably to compensate for not having an actual storyline and relying on teens who still think that fart jokes are funny. (sorry if this is you, innit). Even though these guys had some really piercing ‘jokes’, I can’t be too harsh because all spoofs are guilty of being misogynistic and juvenile to some degree. Does a woman saying “Wait, what about my breasts? Should I show them?” sound #metoo to you? It doesn’t to me. I know that everything is tongue in cheek, but sometimes, spoofs would just do things for absolutely no reason, and it wasn’t really that funny.

To your left,

It’s Jack Sparrow.

You turn around.

There’s a fake Michael Jackson.

Why?!??!!

A good spoof requires creativity—not just a reliance on shallow topics or celebrity gags. When you name a film, like, for instance, ‘The 41 Year Old Virgin who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and felt Superbad about it’ (this is real btw), it is more likely to recycle scenes from the original films and eliminates the possibility of subtlety or uniqueness, which is where good humour lies a lot of the time. If they get it right, a spoof can be great. As this is a safe space that I have built brick by brick, I can say that…I like spoofs. Please I’m still a wholesome, small town girl! I just appreciate SOME risqué humour and testing comedic boundaries. But balance and kindness is necessary, always.

We are in a comedy era where crude humour that would have garnered a chuckle before can’t be spoken about now without sending one to HR. In general, comedy is the quickest genre to age as standards change over time, especially as comedy’s prerogative is to question societal boundaries, and we are surrounded by completely different boundaries now. With the reboot revolution hitting spoofs, how will they navigate a spoof mentality in this political climate? Will they even care? Let’s see together. I’ll watch and report back, make sure that you do the same!