Is parody a form of bricolage?

The Simpsons is currently on its 26^th season and in May 2015, Fox Broadcasting Company renewed the 27th and 28th seasons. The show has an endless amount of characters to represent modern day society resulting in few aspects of past and present being untouched in by The Simpsons satire nature. The show consistently relies on parodies in order to conform to its comedy genre and producers rely heavily on bricolage for its paradoxical success. Defined by Levi Strauss (1968), bricolage is a postmodern term for the poaching of pre-existing materials to create something new. In other words, it is the intertextual practice of adopting and adapting fragments from other texts and using them in a new, creative way. The Simpsons frequently uses bricolage as a form of parody to conform to it comedy genre, ridiculing past events, famous people and current affairs. Gray (2006, pg. 3) argued that “texts do not just interact with audiences; they interact with other texts.” However, the Simpsons put a humorous take on these intertextual references and in order to understand them, we have to re-decode them as we view. We have to gain a different and new understanding of them rather than take the same reading as before. An example of this can be seen in the opening sequence of The Simpsons Movie (Silverman 2007) whereby the 'simpsonised' band Greenday replicate a scene taken from The Titanic (Cameron 1997).

Fig 4. Band playing while ship sinks (Titanic, 1997)

Fig. 5 Greenday playing while stage sinks (The Simpsons Movie, 2007)

In The Simpsons Movie, the band is featured playing on a floating stage until an attack from the audience causes the barge to sink. There is a direct relation between both scenes through the use of both bands playing the same hymn, “Nearer my God to thee.” 

Furthermore, the longshot of the barge sinking vertically into the water mimics the sinking scene taken from The Titanic.(See fig 6 and 7) 

By using Greenday – a band that was upcoming and popular back in 2007, the producers have put a twist on the original sinking of The Titantic - a gag most audiences should be able to decode. As The Simpsons “was initially aimed at adults” (Stoyle, 2009) but younger audiences quickly latched onto the series, the writers often try to make intertextual references which as a whole, ignore the division between younger and older audiences. References are usually made so the whole of The Simpsons audience are in a position decode the meaning. However, it could be argued that in this instance, a younger audience of 5-11 year olds may not understand the reference to the sinking of the Titanic, or nor would anyone who hasn’t seen the film or heard about the catastrophe event. This would result in the audience rejecting the producers primary message (Hall, 1980). The Simpsons constantly adapts iconic images from reality and at the same time distorts and recreates them to produce new images that fit into the fictional world of Springfield.

Fig. 6, Titanic Sinking (Badr Eldin Magdy, 2013)

Fig. 7, Greenday sinking (The Simpsons Movie, 2007)