The Laboratorium : Post About Parodies Constructed Entirely of Self-Referential Utterances

Link to generic movie trailer
Apology for posting twice about the same TV news parody
Tribute to the song that introduced me to the concept

Question to blog readers inquiring about similar examples for other media.

Obligatory credit to Metafilter.

March 7, 2010 at 7:39 AM

joe

doubting if other media, like the written word, are amenable to self-referential utterance fun.

realizing this post and comment disprove last statement.

resigning to submit comment anyway.

March 7, 2010 at 12:29 PM

Kat

Comment expressing appreciation for post.

March 7, 2010 at 7:29 PM

john walker

this not a pipe

March 8, 2010 at 2:42 PM

Richard

I heard this once on TV, no idea who it was singing it though:

When you’re singing a blues song, you always sing the first line twice.
Oh, when you’re singing a blues song, you always sing the first line twice.
And along about the second line, anything that rhymes will suffice.

Richard

March 16, 2010 at 5:32 AM

Richard

Oh, here’s another one for your collection: Academy Award Winning Movie Trailer

Richard

March 16, 2010 at 8:57 AM

James Grimmelmann

Richard, isn’t that the same link I started with?

But here’s another example: The Song that Goes Like This.

March 16, 2010 at 1:13 PM

Richard

Richard, isn’t that the same link I started with?

Hah, yes, so it is! For some reason, I began reading at “apology for posting twice” and missed it; I guess I must have thought that this first line was the first one you were posting twice about (sigh).

Oh well, life wouldn’t be life without embarrassment.

The idea of using abstractions instead of content is an old one, of course, but they’re surprisingly hard to track down. I wonder if there are any examples where the lines are the polar opposite of what they describe? That might be quite interesting.

Richard

March 16, 2010 at 6:25 PM

john walker

a standard art school exercise was : draw something without drawing it. Remember being set a pineapple, one of the smarties drew a can (of pineapple).

Steven J Gould years ago made the point that in modern Greek a meta-phor is… a removal truck.

March 17, 2010 at 12:07 PM

Gillian Spraggs

The ultimate self-referential utterance may perhaps be Erasmus’s Praise of Folly (1509), a parody of a formal encomium in which Folly personified delivers a speech in praise of herself, the content of which is by definition folly, and at the same time full of recognizable truths about human folly.

March 21, 2010 at 10:48 PM

john walker

Interesting interview in New Scientist with Kees van Deemter on Vaugeness

Will the web need Vagueness?

As we move toward a semantic web where the formal representations are symbolic, the challenge is to figure out how to represent vague or gradable things, such as “affordable” housing or “ancient” monuments.

In all of Cézanne’s most perfect representations of the experience of reality, there are blank ‘unfinished’ patches, without these unfinished patches the picture would not be complete.

April 24, 2010 at 11:50 AM

Daniel Reetz

Hitler parody of Hitler upset about the removal of Hitler parodies from YouTube.

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