Teleparody

Teleparody: Predicting/Preventing the TV Discourse of Tomorrow
Angela Hague and David Lavery

“The writing of a novel is a form of the loss of creative liberty. . . . In turn, the reviewing of books is a servitude still less noble. Of the writer one can at least say that he has enslaved himself—by the theme selected. The critic is in a worse position: as the convict is chained to his wheelbarrow, so the reviewer is chained to the work reviewed. The writer loses his freedom in his own book, the critic in another.”

Every great writer, Borges once noted enigmatically in an essay on Franz Kafka, "creates his precursors" (365; Borges’s emphasis). But does not every new art form as well? Every new critical form? Whatever the fictions that make up this volume actually are (and even the editors will admit they are not entirely certain, though as a gloss we have thought of them as “prophetic/prophylactic” criticism), they are not without precedent. They have not only cursors/cursers—those colleagues who complained, at a national conference where some of them were presented, that we had “gone too far!” (and by complaining confirmed that, in Eco’s characterization, we were doing parody just right)—but precursors.

As parodies, after all, they partake of a long tradition. As early as the Greek comic playwright Aristophanes and the Roman rhetorician Quintillian, parody, a word derived from Greek roots meaning “to sing” and “along side of/subsidiary to,”[1] was already considered, in theory and in practice, “pejorative in intent and ridiculing in its ethos or intended response” (Hutcheon 51). Writing in 1962 Gilbert Highet speaks of parody’s range as “amusement, derision, and sometimes scorn” (69). More recently, Linda Hutcheon in A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (1985) argues for the centrality of parody to Postmodernism: in the age of “the already said” (Eco’s phrase—see the “Afterword” to Name of the Rose), parody—whether derisive, playful, or reverent—has naturally become ubiquitous. Parody, Hutcheon argues, should be thought of as “a form of imitation, but imitation characterized by ironic inversion, not always at the expense of the parodied text” (6). The teleparodies that follow—mostly taking the form of reviews[2]—continue parody’s grand tradition, embodying all its inherent contradictions, but they evoke as well a somewhat more esoteric, and more difficult to identify, lineage.

If, for example, some of the following make fabulous use of the pedant’s tools—the footnote, the bibliography, and the scholarly commentary—as discursive forms, well did not Vladimir Nabokov in Pale Fire (1962), a “novel” comprised of a thirty page poem followed by 150+ pages of mock-arcane annotation, pave the way?

If our supposedly academic volume taken as a whole strains credulity and fails to pass the “duck test,” it is not the first. In the June 25, 1996 issue of The Village Voice was it not possible to read an announcement of a forthcoming already published tome (assembled by SWISH [The Society for the Withering Investigation of Sports]) very much in the same spirit as the present one?

“Essays” for Re/Bound, we are told in a concluding whimsical note, “must be submitted in accordance with The Chicago Bulls Manual of Style.”

If these pages contain occasional enigmatic references to other non-existents—books, for example, that will not be published for several decades, or futuristic media developments—in a strange loop of interconnecting fictions, they are in good company. For do we not find in Douglas R. Hofstadter’s award-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid an equally loopy, vaguely familiar annotated bibliography entry?

Gebstadter, Egbert R. Copper, Silver, Gold: An Indestructible Metal Alloy. Perth: Acidic Books, 1979. A formidable hodge-podge, turgid and confused—yet remarkably similar to the present work. Professor Gebstadter’s Shandean digressions include some excellent examples of indirect self-reference. Of particular interest is a reference in its well-annotated bibliography to an isomorphic, but imaginary book. (748)

If Teleparody’s reviewers have read and critiqued books that are not yet, they imitate genius.[3] For has not the impossibly polymathic Polish science fiction mastermind Stanislaw Lem authored two entirely comparable books: A Perfect Vacuum (1971), a collection of “perfect reviews of non-existent books” (books, Lem implies, he had always meant to write but had not gotten around to), and Imaginary Magnitude (1981), prefaces for books that will be written in the 21st century.[4] “Literature to date has told us of fictitious characters,” Lem explains. We shall go further: we shall depict fictitious books” (Lem’s emphasis). In such a development Lem discerns “a chance to regain creative liberty, and at the same time to wed two opposing spirits—that of the belletrist and that of the critic” (A Perfect Vacuum 4).[5]

If these teleparodies play matchmaker to artistic and critical/scholarly impulses through the medium of television, the following nuptials are not the first of their kind. Nor are they the first to blur the boundary between real scholarship and parody. The reader will no doubt recall the grave commotion caused several years back by the publication in the cultural studies journal Social Text of an article titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutic of Quantum Gravity” by NYU physicist Alan D. Sokal. When Sokal subsequently revealed in Lingua Franca that his essay was in fact a parody, a hoax intended to expose the nakedness of postmodern critical emperors, all hell broke loose.

Sokal was not the only scholar at play in the 1990s. Lawrence Douglas and Alexander George authored an hilarious put-on called “Freud’s Phonographic Memory and the Case of the Missing Kiddush Cups” (published in Tikkun), a send-up of scholarly discourse that includes a footnote citing an essay by Father Terence McFeely, S. J., entitled “The Mammary of Things Past: What is Beneath Freud’s Slip,” (published in The Journal of Genital Theory). As Douglas explained in a back page piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education, their attempt at humor, immediately recognized as such by his own mother, who found it hilarious, was subsequently cited with great seriousness by several scholars (with tin ears equal to those of Social Text’s editors) who had not gotten the joke.

Teleparody, too, has bred some confusion. When this book was in development, the editors posted for a time some of these teleparodies on the web to facilitate editing. One of the internet search engines discovered the otherwise blind site, and a surfer who discovered my own contribution to this book (a review of a book on Baywatch) called attention to the supposed author, a former acquaintance of mine, of one of the essays in that book.[6] My colleague, congratulated on his recent publication, e-mailed me to inquire how he had come to publish an essay that he did not remember ever having written. With ease I explained that I had merely appropriated his real name as the fictional author of a make believe essay in an imaginary book which I was pretending to review. He was not amused, and I removed his name.

Nor are we the first to send-up television. Perhaps television lends itself to parody. After all, as Mark Crispin Miller argues, the medium “does not elicit our rapt absorption or hearty agreement, but . . . actually flatters us for the very boredom and distrust which it inspires in us.” Television, in Miller’s deeply cynical view, “solicits each viewer’s allegiance by reflecting back his/her own automatic skepticism toward TV” (194). If TV “derides and conquers,” if, that is, it is inherently inclined toward self-parody—it is possible that any serious (or mock-serious) consideration of it will seem to be a put-on.

I grew up reading the brilliant television parodies in Mad Magazine recently collected in book form. Today, the always hilarious online humor newspaper The Onion masterfully parodies television scholarship. In one piece, “Report: Mankind’s Knowledge of TV Trivia Doubling Every Three Years,” we learn that research conducted by Rutgers University’s Center for Media Studies indicates that “species familiarity” with television minutiae is rapidly increasing and improving in quality. The Onion quotes Mark Bennett (whose wonderful “fantasy blueprints for classic TV homes” are featured in these page): “It’s no longer all that impressive to know that two different actors played Darrin on Bewitched. . . . To impress these days, you’d have to know that there were two Mrs. Kravitzes. Or two Louise Tates. Or that Jerry Seinfeld was on the first season of Benson.”[7]

But it hasn’t just been humor zines that have parodied television. In pieces that might well be included in this volume, we find such a major intellectual as the Italian semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco parodying television scholarship in such journalistic pieces as “How to Be a TV Host” and “The Phenomenology of Mike Bongiorno.”[8] As original as we have tried to be, we too suffer the anxiety of influence.

As Geraghty and Lusted have observed (a passage also quoted by Matt Hills later in this volume): "Criticisms of Television Studies are often based on a confusion between what is studied and the act of studying, and so it is assumed that because some television is sloppy, badly researched and offensive so too is its study." Our anomalous contribution to Television Studies, a book whose genesis was (as my co-editor will explain in the following section) in the (too) serious consideration of bad television, Teleparody was, in a sense, spawned by the very confusion Geraghty and Lusted delineate. Beyond its humble beginnings, however, it became (we hope you will agree) something substantially more.[9]

Lawrence Douglas’ perplexing experience with scholarly fiction led him to a surprising conclusion: “For all our savvy and theoretical sophistication, we have lost the capacity to make very simple judgments about a text—such as, for example, whether it claims to be true or intends to make us laugh.” We trust Teleparody will produce no such confusion.

This book has a curious origin. A few years ago I attended a women's study conference with several colleagues, a yearly ritual some female members of the department used to escape from the intellectual rigors of the English Department at Middle Tennessee State University. Before joining my friends at a session titled "Women and Film," I stopped by the book display room to kill some time and meandered around the several tables covered in books, idly picking them up and skimming their covers and tables of contents. At a certain point I realized they were all essentially the same book, with barely discernible differences packaged in identical jargon and critical "assumptions"—each one, of course, proclaiming itself a radical new way of rethinking whatever hackneyed topic it pretended to enlighten. I had experienced this sense of the eternal recurrence of postmodernist thought before, but for some reason this time it struck me as comical. I didn't laugh, of course; I was surrounded by depressed-looking middle-aged women academics who looked as if they wouldn't appreciate a snicker, so I kept silent, rifling through studies of oppression, aging, healing, transformation, empowerment, and gender conflict.

Alas. The laughter I repressed was biding its time, waiting for the appropriate catalyst, which turned out to be the first paper of the session we all dutifully sat down to hear fortunately in the back row, as it turned out. I have no memory of what the paper was actually about, except for the fact it concerned some kind of female problem in The Piano—pronounced "pianer" because of the reader's unfortunate accent. But the accent wasn't the problem, for I'd been hearing it for all too many years to be offended, nor was the sex of the reader: I firmly believe that men have a right, and perhaps even an obligation, to read papers at women's studies conferences. It was the slightly hesitant earnestness of the delivery coupled with the hint of a daring piety: the author of this piece clearly thought he was breaking new ground and felt very pleased with himself as a result. I whispered to Charisse Gendron, who sat to my right, that "his voice is driving me crazy." Apparently she agreed, because she chuckled and then laughed aloud, hastily clapping her hand to her mouth. And then he said the word phallogocentrism.

Now we'd heard the word before (we were adults after all), but uttered at that particular moment and in that particular accent phallogocentrism took on a whole new absurd life of its own, exacerbated by the fact that the reader had apparently failed to determine its pronunciation before beginning to read the paper. He loved that word, you could tell, and hadn't realized its existence until quite recently, and he was determined to use it over and over and over again—each time with a different pronunciation. Who could have guessed how many different ways phallogocentrism can be pronounced? Charisse and I began laughing quietly at first, turning to look at each other every time the speaker brought forward a new and more creative version of phallogocentrism, and at some point our amusement mutated into mutual hysteria. We'd subside for a moment and then something—a dramatic pause or self-satisfied smile at the end of a sentence, or, more frequently, the emergence of a new variant of phallogocentrism—would set us off again.

We soon discovered that we couldn't stop laughing and were incapable of laughing quietly; the more we tried to smother our hilarity the funnier the situation became. Regrettably, the seats in each row of this small auditorium were connected to one another, and our increasingly failed attempts to control our laughter began to cause the entire row of seats to shake and wobble—at which point Charisse and I (by this time we had stuffed Kleenex in our mouths in yet another try at silencing ourselves) dived down onto the floor, perhaps hoping to remain unseen if not unheard. The illusion of being hidden apparently helped, for after a few moments we managed to stop laughing and sat back in our seats. I remember I suddenly realized that I was in terrible physical pain from repressing (and failing to repress) so much laughter and had begun to congratulate myself on finally re-establishing some self-control. Later I wondered how the people in front of us had managed not to turn around to see what those smothered gasps and moans were about; perhaps they speculated that certain members of the audience, unduly stimulated by the repetition of phallogocentrism, had begun to copulate frenetically in the aisles.

To my left sat Linda Badley, who throughout the entire performance had maintained an admirable stony-faced equanimity interrupted by occasional sympathetic sideways glances at the two of us. At the very moment Charisse and I regained the imitation of a professional demeanor, Linda emitted a very loud monosyllabic bark of laughter that was probably heard in the next room. That did it. As I fell forward in a new seizure of hilarity, I heard Charisse, again overcome with gales of laughter, jump up and start to move. With lightening speed she managed to get out of the row of seats and began to head toward the door. My last vision of her is etched forever in my memory: a woman bent over almost double, choking with laughter, determined to leave the scene of the crime. In a very real sense that was Charisse's exit from academe; a year later she resigned a tenured full professorship and moved to Minneapolis to work in a boutique. My own departure has been less official. Once Charisse left the room our folie a deux was over, and I was able to finish listening to the story of the silenced female in The Pianer without even smiling. However, since that time I have been unable to read any kind of "serious" paper at a scholarly conference, a situation that has limited me to reading ironic essays on alien abduction at popular culture conventions. (Alien abduction as an area of research has its joys, let me assure you, for while I'm convinced the aliens are as centered on their collective logos as the rest of us, they are rumored to sport no phalli.) I have also developed a dangerously allergic sensitivity to many words and phrases used in theory and criticism, among them all forms of the infinitives "to silence," to "marginalize," "to gesture," and "to transgress." "Inscribe," "encrypt," and "iterate" are also out, as are most words connected by slashes or interrupted by parentheses. Even two such apparently innocuous words such as "site" and "space" are suspect.

One Saturday afternoon, having just finished editing the manuscript of Deny All Knowledge: Reading The X-Files (a collection of essays I edited with David Lavery), I began to wonder how the frail vessel of that particular television show could possible carry the weight of all that agonized theorizing the authors had expended upon it. I had recently begun watching reruns of Simon and Simon for their soporific effects (I heartily recommend this to anyone who fears becoming dependent upon Ambien) and began musing about how long it would be until a show that inane would become the battleground for cultural studies debates. What English teachers will do to avoid grading papers: I turned on my laptop and decided to write the review of the book before anyone (David Lavery?) got around to commissioning the essays for it. The result is the review of Boys Will Be Boys that follows. When in the interests of full disclosure I showed the "review" to Professor Lavery, he immediately contacted Allison Graham and Rhonda Wilcox to write their own "reviews," and the four of us presented the parodies that appear in this book at the Popular Culture Convention in Las Vegas in 1996.

Three other people who appear in Teleparody were in the audience, Robert Thompson, who contributed the Afterword; Dennis Hall, who does to Mr. Ed what should have been done long ago; and Jimmie Reeves (aka Ben Picken-Schnozzel), who accomplishes the same mission in relation to Homi Bhabha and a legion of other post-thinkers. They got the joke. Some others didn't; I suppose they were the ones who walked out rather huffily. So well received were the "reviews" (and under that rubric I include the people who were offended) that we decided to turn it into a book of parodies of television scholarship. What we soon learned was how eager academics are to mock themselves-and how well they do it. We also discovered that a number of university presses were not amused; my favorite rejection letter reads that "because we publish in the area of television and popular culture studies we do not believe that this collection would be appropriate for our list." Which brings me back to the sound of muffled laughter and phallogocentrism.

In his fulsome and self-congratulatory introduction to Boys Will Be Boys: Critical Approaches to Simon and Simon, editor David Lavery calls the now-defunct television series “the most significant event in media history in the past two decades.” Lavery also makes it clear that he believes that this collection of essays more than equals its subject, and while this claim initially appears to be exaggerated, a reading of the articles in the collection certainly lends credence to Lavery’s assertion.

The first essay by occult activist Artemis Bell sets the tone of the book. In “Boys Just Wanna Have Fun,” Bell insists that the relationship between the two “brothers” is in fact a sexual one, that Rick Simon (played by Gerald McRaney), supposedly A. J. Simon’s older brother, is in fact his lover posing as his sibling, a pretence encouraged by A. J.’s mother, who prefers her son’s homosexual relationship to a heterosexual one. Bell focuses on some of the more ambiguous moments in Simon and Simon, including Rick’s singing of a mock country love song to A. J. (played by Jameson Parker) in one episode, both brothers’ repeated attempts to prevent women from emerging as a significant issue in almost every episode, and the brothers’ undivided interest in one another throughout the series. “No women sully the amusement-park world of Rick and A. J.,” says Bell, “and nothing interferes with the erotic maneuverings of the two men who flaunt their sexuality while thumbing both their noses at the gullible viewers who believe they are watching just another detective series.” Bell also exhaustively analyzes the series’s theme song, with its incantation of “Because they’re not just brothers; they’re best friends too” in order to prove her point, noting that the song was dropped after the first season as the homosexual subtext became more blatant. She concludes by stating that “The importance of Simon and Simon as a cultural artifact cannot be understated. While pretending to be an innocuous—and sometimes fatuous—television show about two harmlessly inept brothers attempting to solve pointless crimes, in reality the series presented the first gay couple in television history. And no one noticed.”

In “Romancing the Family Simon,” Charisse Gendron subjects the show to a no-holds-barred Lacanian reading, persuasively contending that A. J.’s relationship with his mother is simultaneously symbiotic and post-Oedipal. “Jack Simon is dead, and A. J. now occupies the Father’s space,” she says succinctly, adding that A. J.’s inability to break free from his strong bond with his mother renders him unable to adequately become the Father. Instead, it is Rick Simon who functions as the symbolic Father, but his second-class status is revealed in his inability to speak the Word that can command both Mrs. Simon and A. J. (Here Gendron analyzes at some length the roots and results of Rick’s inarticulate, truncated use of language, also incisively deconstructing the famous “incompleted kiss” of the credit sequence, in which Mother Simon, seated behind a birthday cake, is lovingly kissed by A. J.; as careful viewers of the series know so well, the scene is cut before Rick can complete his kiss.) Consequently, Mother Simon turns to A. J. for support and affection, forcing Rick into the role of an embittered voyeur. Gendron concludes by noting that “the Simons are a family in deep emotional turmoil, a family that delineates a kind of sexual pathology rarely seen on American television.”

Will Brantley’s coyly named “Eroteneutics” turns a more technical eye upon the series. Premising that the narrative of Simon and Simon endlessly eroticizes the San Diego landscape the brothers move through, Brantley goes on to detail how the repeated low angle shots of skyscrapers (he counts forty-five examples in the first season alone) confront the viewer with an external phallic world of monolithic barriers that simultaneously threaten and beckon. Conversely, interior spaces such as A. J.’s car and house and Rick’s boat are rendered claustrophobic and ominous by a static camera that underscores the two detectives’ inability to break out of the vaginal interstices of a narrative that denies them movement and freedom, just as the lingering establishing shots of A. J.’s house reinforce the womblike environment that both nourishes and constricts him. Although the essay depends upon a great deal of technical analysis that is difficult to paraphrase, it leaves the reader convinced of the brilliantly self-conscious yet deft filmic style of the series.

Interpretation takes a more political turn in Allison Graham’s “What Did You Do in the War, Rick?” Assuming the impassioned political stance that has become the signature of all her forays into cultural criticism, Graham insists that the repeated allusions to Rick Simon’s Vietnam experience provide the only prism through which the series can be understood. Vietnam, she observes, throws its dark shadow across the entire series and results in Rick’s inability to connect with anyone other than his family, truck, boat, and dog. “Rick’s immaturity and ironic detachment are emblematic of the emotional cauterization caused by his Vietnam past,” says Graham, going on to remark that “his younger, blonder brother represents an alter ego untainted by the horrors of Vietnam, an alter ego who is a painful reminder of what might have been.” Rick’s refusal to take the brothers’ investigative business as seriously as does A. J. and his insistence upon living in a boat rather than a house are yet further examples of his inability to re-enter a culture that has damaged and then denied his identity as a Vietnam veteran. “Rick Simon,” Graham warns,” is a pressure cooker about to explode. His mother and brother are all that stand between him and potential catastrophe.” Graham’s ruthless yet profoundly compassionate analysis of Rick Simon’s difficulties is not simply cultural criticism at its best; rather, her article constitutes an ode for an entire generation.

But it is Lucia ReSalvo’s brilliant “‘Don’t Tell Anybody’: The Effect of Childhood Sexual Abuse upon A. J. Simon” that finally unveils the nasty secret the series so deceptively hides. In her characteristically blunt style, ReSalvo begins by announcing that “A. J. Simon was sexually abused by his older brother as a child. As an adult the abuse continues. Simon and Simon, perhaps the most courageous television series ever aired, weekly presented American viewers with an incest victim’s inability to resist the sexual demands of an older brother and his mother’s complicity in the relationship.” These are not idle assertions, for ReSalvo, with the precision and attention to detail that have made her an internationally acclaimed literary critic, must finally persuade anyone who initially doubts her thesis. A. J., she maintains, exhibits the typical behaviors of the sexually abused individual, including uncertain and clumsy body language, an over-attention to grooming and dress, verbal hesitancy, fear of firearms, and, most telling, caution in business transactions. Rick Simon, on the other hand, assumes the classic stance of the sexual perpetrator, revealing his proclivities in his loose-limbed, assertive body language, his love of “taking chances” that often physically endangers both brothers, careless attitudes toward investment and finance, and the wearing of his signature cowboy hat and tight jeans. Indeed, ReSalvo believes that the clothing of the brothers provides the most efficient method to sexually de-code the series. Rick’s casual style reinforces his dominant role in the relationship, while A. J.’s insistence upon always wearing a suit and tie signals his need for a protective covering that symbolically—though not actually—will protect him from his brother’s advances. The wearing of the tie becomes, for A. J., “an understandable but pitiful assertion of a phallic identity that has been wrested from him by his brother.” Rick Simon, ReSalvo pointedly notes, “does not need to wear a tie.” The essay concludes with an examination of the role of Mother Simon, noting (as do several of the other contributors) her very close relationship with her younger son. “But this relationship has not caused her to protect him from Rick,” ReSalvo cogently argues. “Instead, the relationship between A. J. and his mother has been initiated and maintained by A. J., who in his thirties is still hoping that his mother will intervene and put a stop to the sexual degradation that destroyed his childhood and blights his adult years.” ReSalvo is not sanguine about A. J.’s future, however, for she believes that “his inner child has been so damaged it is unlikely that recovery is possible. For the Simon family, there can be no healing.”

Boys Will Be Boys does not end, however, with the ReSalvo essay but instead concludes with a very curious coda indeed, a long and for the most part vitriolic essay by former Christian Collusion leader Rafe Rood. Rood, who apparently was given access to all the other essays in the collection in order to write his rejoinder, uses the book, and particularly articles by Bell, Brantley, and ReSalvo, to mount an attack upon what he calls “the obscene ramblings of demented academics desperately searching for a worm in a perfectly healthy apple.” Attempts to pathologize the Simon family will ultimately fail, he contends, because the truth is that the two brothers and their charming mother represent the best television—and indeed the entire culture—has to offer. “Warm, loving, unselfish, and polite people,” Rood piously intones, “and the strong bonds that unite them will always prove victorious over the sleazy theoretical meanderings of overpaid, underworked intellectuals.” After declaring Victory Over Sleaze Rood concludes his essay by describing Simon and Simon as “the centerpiece of the Reagan era, a luxuriant flowering of family values, mother love, and business acumen that we may not be privileged to see again.”

One can only speculate what was in editor Lavery’s mind when he chose to include Rood’s essay in the collection, but a recent article in The American Thinker by Edward Sherwin, a widely respected George Herbert scholar, sheds some light upon the traditional academic response to the recent spate of books on television criticism. In “Requiem for a Lightweight,” Sherwin denounces Boys Will Be Boys and its compatriots as “shallow, ignorant, farcical works that serve only to undermine the academic integrity of real scholarship.” Naming Lavery the “Roger Corman of critical theory” and denouncing what he calls “The Popular Culture Agenda,” Sherwin issues a stinging challenge to university presses to, in his phrase, “stop the bleeding” and get back to the real business of academic publishing. (It should be noted that Sherwin does not specify what this real business is.) Whatever may be one’s responses to “television scholarship,” however, it cannot be denied that after reading Boys Will Be Boys one can only watch Simon and Simon with a darkened vision and ominous sense of the series’s labyrinthine subtexts. Like James Joyce’s Ulysses, the show would seem to have exhausted both its generic form and conventions and all critical attempts at interpretation.

[1] The ambiguous meaning—“designating both ‘beside’ and ‘opposite”—of the root word “para” almost predicts the dual nature of parody as both criticism and homage (Rose 46).

[2] Hutcheon quotes W. H. Auden’s wishful thinking—in his concept of a “daydream College for Bards”—that literary criticism, per se, be banned, replaced by “the writing of parodies” as the “only criticial exercise required of students” (51). Though by no means poets, our teleparodists all seem to have been schooled in Auden’s academy.

[3] Although the precedent I am about to cite is Polish, and more than one of our teleparodists is English, there may be something distinctly American about our enterprise. As the historian Daniel Boorstin has observed, American discourse is characterized by a way of speaking about things “which had not yet gone through the formality of taking place” (The Americans 98). Our book dispenses with formalities.

[4] “Reviewing non-existent books is not Lem’s invention,” he admits; “we find such experiments not only in a contemporary writer, Jorge Luis Borges (for example his “Investigations of the Writings of Herbert Quaine”), but the idea goes further back—and even Rabelais was not the first to make use of it” (A Perfect Vacuum 3).

[5] Elsewhere Lem wonders aloud:

If no philosopher named Schopenhauer had ever existed and if Borges had invented in a story a doctrine called "The World as Will," we would accept this as a bit of fiction, not of the history of philosophy. But of what kind of fiction, indeed? Of fantastic philosophy, because it was published nonassertively. Here is a literature of imaginary ideas, of fictional values, of other civilizations—in a word, the fantasy of the "abstract." (“Todorov’s” 220)

Our teleparodists, we might suggest, are practicing “fantastic criticism.”

[6] As the reader will soon discover, our authors sometimes use real names (though only with permission), and sometimes change names to protect the innocent.

[7] In another hilarious spoof (“Report: TV Helps Build Valuable Looking Skills”—this time from NYU’s Center for Media Studies), we learn that adults “who grew up in homes without television” have “difficulty staring blankly at things for longer than a few seconds.” In fact,

they frequently shifted their gaze and focus around the testing environment, often engaging others in the room in conversation and generally making a lot of disruptive noise and movement. Television enriched adults, however, could sit and look at anything: a spot on the ceiling, a fire-alarm box, a stack of magazines on a table.

As we write, yet another delicious parody has just appeared in The Onion. Its first paragraph reads: “WASHINGTON, DC—Pressure is building for the nation's TV networks to offer a formal apology and reparations to the four generations of Americans who lost millions of hours to inane sitcoms.”

[8] Bongiorno is an Italian TV celebrity, best known as the host of quiz shows.

[9] As this book was in development, our colleague Charles Wolfe, perhaps the foremost contemporary scholar of American popular music, passed on to us an essay he had written (but never published) in the late 1960s called “Bilko’s Plots and the Bilko Plots: Toward a Structural Definition of Television Situation Comedy.” He thought it might be appropriate. A brilliant exercise in what would eventually be called “narratological criticism,” it is, however, anything but a parody and can only be thought of as such because it takes seriously a sit-com high-brow thinking would deem not worthy of another thought. (We have placed Dr. Wolfe’s essay on the Teleparody website.)

Reviewed by Angela Hague