Parody is a difficult genre even for professional writers. Nothing prevents someone from starting a parody account in Twitter, but balancing style and humor poses a real challenge. Niku Hooli, who’s written a master’s thesis on such accounts in Finnish, states that success depends on the reader recognizing that the account is a parody. The heart of parody is skillful imitation of the target’s style, accompanied by a trampling of expectations and carrying ideas to amusing extremes. Hooli has found 24 Finnish parody accounts, for example @KKammola and @MannerheimCGE. Typically, these Finnish accounts have a few hundred tweets and a modest audience; the most popular, @KKammola, has nearly 12,000 followers. Popular parody accounts in English, like @TheTweetOfGod and @Queen_UK, have over a million followers. One characteristic of successful parodies is that the content reflects not only the “authors” being parodied but also the ideas or issues they represent. Take the @notzuckerberg account, which lampoons not only the guy in the hoodie but his online empire. A tweet from last week: “I apologize that Facebook went down for thirty minutes this morning and that all of you were forced to spend that half hour meaningfully.”
The Word of the week column will be on vacation in July and returns in August. Have a beautiful summer!