With the movie (you know which one) so fresh in my mind, I thought quite a bit about what to do this week. I don’t know what Superman stories would be best to follow it. Certainly, anything that would be capable of TOPPING it is likely something I’ve already read. So rather than any of that, I decided to go in the opposite direction: parody. Parody is a classic format for stories, something that’s been around almost as long as storytelling itself. I’m pretty sure that after the first caveman, Ug, finished regaling his tribe with the story of how he singlehandedly took down a wooly mammoth, when he walked away his buddy Og stood up and started doing a mocking impression of Ug getting impaled by a tusk.

In the nearly 90 years of his existence, Superman has been parodied many times, and we’re going to look at those this week. We’ll look at his parodies from comics and magazines like Mad and Cracked, check out spoofs from shows like Saturday Night Live, and even delve into the times that the Looney Tunes did their own take on the Man of Steel. So this week, friends, let’s laugh.

And as always, you can check out earlier blogs in the Year of Superman Archive!

Wed., July 16

Comics: Mad #4, What The–?! #2

Notes: Everybody has heard of Mad Magazine, but if you’re not a hardcore comic book nerd like myself you may not know that Mad actually started out as a comic, published by EC Comics, the same company responsible for classics like Tales From the Crypt and Weird Science. When the anti-comic furor of the 50s led to the creation of the Comics Code of America, an organization that at times seemed intended solely to crush EC out of existence, they pivoted and made Mad a magazine instead, because evidently making the page size larger and switching to black-and-white was enough to exempt it from the Code. I didn’t say it made sense, people.

But anyway, the fourth issue of Mad (the comic book) brought us one of the first Superman parodies in print: “Superduperman” by Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood. Here we meet Clark Bent, assistant copy boy at the Daily Dirt, a pathetic creature who has spent the last ten years saving up his meager salary (seventy-five cents and a good bus token) in the hopes of buying a pearl necklace for “girl reporter” Lois Pain. The city of Cosmopolis is being plagued by an “Unknown Monster,” and Clark dives into a phone booth (then a second because the first was occupied) to change into Superduperman. To his shock, he discovers that the “Monster” is, in fact, Captain Marbles, who has gone rogue and decided he’s just in it for the money.

A few interesting things here: Mad #4 was published in 1953, just a few months before Fawcett Comics would throw in the towel in their years-long court battle against National Comics over their claim that Captain Marvel infringed on their Superman copyright. So there’s a meta level to having Superduperman slug it out with Captain Marbles that I find pretty amusing, but I have to wonder if the average kid in 1953 would have gotten that joke. The depiction of “Clark Bent” is pretty striking here, taking the “meek, mild” Clark Kent that we all know and love and making him even more pathetic, making Lois a cold, cruel harpy, and making Superduperman kind of a dunce. 

I think the biggest draw is Wally Wood’s artwork. He was one of the greatest comedic artists of the time, probably of ALL time, and the level of energy and fun he puts on every page is outstanding. The man was a giant and I’m so glad I included this story in the Year of Superman.

In 1988, Marvel Comics decided to get back into the parody game with What The–?!, the Marvel Mag of Mirth and Mayhem. I was 10 years old when this series started, and it was pretty much tailor-made for me. The second issue, though, was something that was actually more special than I realized at the time: Superbman versus the Fantastical Four in “My Badguy, My Enemy!” by none other than John Byrne. 

In 1988, Byrne was wrapping up his time on Superman for DC and returning to Marvel, where had previously done a legendary run on Fantastic Four, so I suppose the idea of having him parody his two greatest achievements in comics to date was a natural match. Byrne wrote and drew this story (with inks by another Superman laureate, Jerry Ordway), which has reporters Park Bench and Nosy Dame travel to New York from their home in Metropopolopolis to report on the newest bankruptcy of the Fantastical Four. When the Human Scorch carelessly causes Nosey’s hairdo to wilt, Superbman jumps into action.

I loved this incredibly goofy story as a kid and, as an adult, I appreciate it on an entirely different level. Byrne was doing something that I admire the hell out of: making fun of himself and having a grand time doing it. The story makes several references to the way Superman was changed in Byrne’s own reboot, including comments about how he’s not as powerful as he was previously, how he’s not as square as he used to be, and how his cape is no longer indestructible. The last one led to a joke that 10-year-old me thought was the funniest thing he’d ever read and, if I’m being honest, adult me still thinks is pretty hilarious:

Even a parody of Ben Grimm still sounds like Ben Grimm, and I think that’s beautiful.

But as the fight between our heroes rages, off to the side there’s a battle of wits between Doctor Bloom, sworn enemy of the Fantastical Four, and Rex Ruthless, sworn enemy of Superbman (the Keeper of the Comics Code actually has to step in at one point to tell them to cut down on the swearing). The two super-geniuses begin arguing over their plots, with Bloom revealing that he faked the FF’s bankruptcy to lure Park Bent to report on it, having deduced that Bent was Superbman. Ruthless finds this HILARIOUS, in a page that I now recognize as being the real pearl of this story. He gives Bloom a lecture on how impossible that would be, a page where Byrne is parodying his own treatment of Lex Luthor from Superman (Vol. 2) #2, in which Luthor rejected the same line of logic connecting Clark and Superman. Byrne even gets into making jokes about his own predilections in panel layout here, stuff that as a kid I didn’t catch on to at all. (I wasn’t reading Superman comics yet at that point, and even if I had been I don’t know if I would have caught on to all the nuances.)

But perhaps the greatest inside joke in the comic is the way Byrne draws Superbman’s s-shield. I remember reading an introduction Byrne once wrote for Man of Steel in which he discussed his history with Superman and how, as a child, he didn’t realize the symbol was supposed to be an “s.” To him, he said, the shapes looked like a pair of fish swimming at one another. So when he got the chance to do a parody, that’s what he drew. That’s a joke that I bet almost NOBODY got – I certainly didn’t get it at the time – but it’s one of my favorites now.

I wish Byrne had done more comedy comics like this one. He had a real flair for it. 

Thur. July 17

Magazines: Mad #208, Cracked #160

Notes: When I was younger I read Mad and Cracked pretty regularly, although I drifted away as I got older. This happened with a lot of stuff, but unlike other things I dropped as being “for kids” like Disney and Archie comics, I never really went back to Mad on a regular basis. At the risk of sounding pretentious, I think my sense of humor just grew in a different direction than those publications specialize in. Still, I’ve got a lot of them from when I was younger and I’ve tracked down others over the years that either featured or reprinted specific Superman comics – plus there are some available (you know where this is going) on the DC Universe Infinite app. So during Parody Week, I’m going to try to go through some of the ones that I’ve got in roughly the order of publication. 

First up is Mad #208, which recycled the title “Superduperman” for its parody of the first Christopher Reeve movie. I can’t find a writer credit, oddly enough, but Mort Drucker’s signature appears on the first page and – let’s be frank – it would be pretty clear it was his art even without it. Drucker was a phenomenal caricaturist, the characters in his Mad parodies immediately recognizable as the celebrities he was spoofing, even when exaggerating or mocking their features. He even nails the design of Glenn Ford and Phillis Thaxter as Jonathan and Martha Kent in their brief appearance. 

I’m not going to bother to recap the story here, because as a parody it’s a fairly by-the-beat retelling of the story of the movie. How well, then, does it succeed as a comedy? 

Eeeeeeeh.

I think this is why I never quite got back to Mad once I got older. The comedy in many of these stories is dependent on straw man jokes and easy targets: a crack about how improbable it is that Lois can afford such an opulent apartment on a reporter’s salary, gags about how outrageously out-of-proportion Marlon Brando’s paycheck for this movie was, and of course, a joke about the glasses. Probably the best joke in the entire parody comes at the very end, after Superduperman spins time back to save “Lotus Lain.” As in the movie, Supes gets a vision of his father reminding him he’s not supposed to interfere with human history. In this version, though, there’s a second voice telling him to do it – it turns out to be the executives at Warner Bros. recognizing that they need Lotus alive for Superduperman II.

The same month that Mad’s parody came out, rival magazine Cracked gave us “Suped-Upman: The Satire.” Once again, there’s no credited creative team, but the artwork to me looks a hell of a lot like the great John Severin, who did stories for Cracked for decades. 

The Cracked story isn’t specifically parodying the movie, but rather just giving us a goofy look at a Superman-type character, and honestly, I think it’s better for it. Freed from trying to draw the actors, Severin’s characters have a life and expressiveness where other parodies sometimes fall short. Cluck Clone doesn’t leave his parents’ farm to become a reporter, but rather gets a job at a delicatessen called the Deli Planet where he meets a lovely girl named Lewis Paine – whose safety takes top priority over gunshot victims when Suped-Upman goes into action a few pages later.

After reading just these two parodies, I feel like I’m already starting to gel a sort of theory of satire, at least how I see it. Of the two, the Cracked story is honestly much funnier and a lot of fun to read, and I think the reason for that is because whoever wrote it wasn’t simply retelling the story of the movie. He took the broad strokes of the Superman legend, tweaked them in a humorous way, and then told his own story rather than just filling in the blanks of the existing plotline like a complicated Mad Lib. Cracked is doing its own thing, and it’s a better story for it.

And you know, the same is true for all the great satires out there. Compare something like Mel Brooks’s Spaceballs to a Friedberg/Seltzer movie such as Epic Movie. Brooks simply uses the CONCEPTS of science fiction (especially, but not exclusively Star Wars) to tell a funny story, whereas Friedberg and Seltzer rip out chunks of existing stories and patch them together like some horrific Frankenquilt that seems to think that simply REFERRING to another movie is enough to qualify as a joke. All of this is building my brain up to what I think I’m going to refer to as Petit’s Law of Satire: Satire is funnier in broad strokes than in specifics. The two stories I read yesterday, from Mad #4 and What The–?! #2, were both really funny, and neither of them was parodying a specific story. The Cracked satire is funnier than the Mad by-the-beat parody. 

I think I’m on to something here.

Let’s see if it holds up over the next few days. 

Comic Books: New Gods Vol. 5 #7 (Guest Appearance), Green Lantern Vol. 8 #23 (Guest Appearance, Conner Kent)

Fri., July 18

Short Films: Super-Rabbit (1943), Stupor Duck (1956), Superior Duck (1996)

Notes: Today I decided to peek in on the second greatest collection of characters in the Warner Bros. catalogue, after the DC superheroes. I’m talking, of course, of the Looney Tunes. I have a deep, abiding love of the likes of Bugs and Daffy, and as each of those stalwarts took their turns poking fun at Superman, I wanted to include them here in Parody Week, starting with Bugs Bunny in Super-Rabbit.

Directed by Chuck Jones, this cartoon starts off with a spoof of the Flesicher shorts, parodying the old “faster than a speeding bullet” intro before bringing us to Super-Rabbit’s origin. Bugs Bunny is a lab animal in this one, given some super-powered carrots that give him incredible powers. He decides the best way to use these powers is to head to Texas and take on a hunter called Cottontail Smith who has dedicated himself to wiping out all rabbits. Bugs does his usual number on Smith and his horse until a midair mishap causes him to lose his power carrots, which Smith and the horse gobble them up. Just before he’s about to be pummeled, Bugs declares, “This looks like a job for a REAL Superman!” Then, in a bit of standard-for-the-time patriotism, he ducks into a phone booth, joins the army, and marches off in the direction of a road sign that inexplicably points to both Berlin AND Tokyo. 

The superhero stuff in this cartoon is almost incidental. The opening sequence is where most of the tropes come in, with the Fleischer-specific parody, but once Bugs gets to Texas and comes to loggerheads with Smith the antics he pulls off are pretty standard for him. Could catching a cannonball and using it to play an impromptu game of basketball count as a feat of super-strength? Sure, but this is also BUGS BUNNY we’re talking about, a cosmic trickster with the ability to warp reality in any manner he deems the most amusing at the time, so I’m not convinced that the magic carrots are strictly necessary here. The only parts of the cartoon that seem specifically dedicated to a Superman parody, other than Bugs’s outfit, are the bits where he’s flying. That does, of course, give us the best joke in the entire short, as Bugs flies into the stratosphere and whips past a horse who is astonished to see a rabbit flying at 30,000 feet.

Think about that for a minute.

Anyway, it’s a good cartoon. Perhaps not the greatest parody in history, but it IS the cartoon that led to the awesome Super-Rabbit figure that adorns one of my Superman shelves, and it’s worth it for that alone. 

Next up, in 1956 Robert McKimson drafted Daffy Duck for another poke at the man of steel in Stupor Duck. This one is a much more direct parody of Superman than Super-Rabbit, beginning with Daffy in disguise as “mild-mannered reporter Cluck Trent.” Daffy overhears his editor watching TV but, true to form, mistakes the broadcast for the braggadocio of a supervillain and sets out to thwart him, only to get thwarted himself over and over. 

Bugs is a classic character, but in terms of parody, I think Daffy is actually more effective. A lot of the humor in this short comes from Daffy making a fool of himself in ways that just wouldn’t happen to Bugs. He saves a building from collapsing, for example, only to wind up getting punched out by the head of the demolition crew that was TRYING to demolish it. He saves a “sinking” ship and gets blasted by the cannon of the submarine he just pulled out of the water. It’s great, goofy stuff that is perfectly in keeping with Daffy Duck, but wouldn’t have worked with Bugs. I think I have to conclude, oddly enough, that although Super-Rabbit is a funnier cartoon, Stupor Duck is a better parody. 

Director Chuck Jones would take one more swing at superheroes more than five decades after Super-Rabbit, teaming up with Daffy for the 1996 short Superior Duck. This time out, Daffy is a sort of mashup between Superman and Duck Dodgers, setting out to save the day only to be constantly thwarted by…his narrator.

Seriously, that’s the entire cartoon. Daffy is out to do some superheroics, but the narrator (voiced by the immortal Thurl Ravenscroft) cannot get his lines right, forcing Daffy into one increasingly-preposterous situation after another. It’s a less direct Superman parody than some of the others, but they make up for it with a last-act cameo that left me in stitches. 

With Mel Blanc having left us by this point, we’re left with different voice actors, some of which work and others don’t. Frank Gorshin, TV’s Riddler, absolutely knocks it out of the park as Daffy and Foghorn Leghorn. Eric Goldberg does a good Porky and Marvin the Martian, but his Tweety left something to be desired. But this still feels like the same Chuck Jones who gave us the likes of Duck Amuck and One Froggy Evening. It’s a hoot. 

TV Episode: The Looney Tunes Show, Season 2, Episode 26: “SuperRabbit.”

Notes: But we’re not done yet! In 2011, the Cartoon Network brought us the highly-underrated cartoon The Looney Tunes Show. I loved this show – rather than simply aping the classic Looney Tunes shorts, they merged those sensibilities with a TV sitcom, casting Bugs and Daffy as roommates in a kind of Odd Couple situation, with Bugs playing the more sensible, straightlaced one to Daffy’s aimless vagabond. If I had heard the show described as such before I watched it, I probably would have dismissed it outright, but I really grew to love the series and to this day wish it had lasted longer than two seasons. 

The episode I’m focusing on was the season two finale (which, sadly, turned out to be the series finale as well), “SuperRabbit.” In this one, as Daffy starts scrounging through Bugs’s belongings looking for stuff to sell (did I mention he was a vagabond?) he comes across a strange crystal carrot. Bugs tries to divert Daffy’s attention from the carrot with a tale of his “true” origins. He isn’t REALLY Bugs Bunny, he claims, but an alien from the planet Crypton. (With a “C.” Because Daffy is WAAAAY too smart to fall for Bugs ripping off Superman’s origin by spelling it with a “K”.”) From there, we actually get an adventure of Bugs as SuperRabbit facing off against some of his greatest enemies: Brainiac (aka Marvin the Martian)! Lex Luthor! (Elmer Fudd, naturally)! And General Zod (Daffy himself)!

I hate to say it, but this was actually one of the weaker episodes of The Looney Tunes Show. The strength of the cartoon came from putting Bugs and Daffy into very sitcom-esque tropes and then spinning them wildly out of control. This episode mostly avoids that, electing instead to do a full-episode parody of what could have been a fairly standard Superman story with a few added jokes (such as Elmer’s Lex Luthor telling people “I’m hunting SuperWabbits”). It’s an okay parody, but it’s nowhere near the level of entertainment that this show was usually capable of, and it makes me sad that the show ended on this note.  

Sat. July 19

Magazines: Mad #225, Cracked #183

Notes: Mad returned to the world of “Superduperman” with a parody of Superman II, with Mort Drucker once again providing artwork and Frank Jacobs writing it. For all I know, Jacobs wrote the first one as well, but as I said a couple of days ago, I couldn’t find a credit for that one. It certainly reads like it was written by the same author. Like the first one, “Superduperman II” is, in essence, a beat-for-beat retelling of the plot of the movie with added puns. Some of them, of course, land better than others. We have a very standard formula for a Mad parody: Jacobs and Drucker essentially break the movie down into single-panel moments; in each panel, the characters make wry observations about the situation they are currently in; and it ends with a punchline. Once you get used to it, the humor comes across as very staccato, with a rhythm that’s predictable, but not in a soothing way, so it’s not surprising that the funniest moments in the story are all things that are original to the comic. There’s a funny bit at the beginning, for example, where they mock the movie for opening up with flashbacks to the first film. Later, during the fight with the Phantom Zone criminals, Rocky Balboa randomly shows up for a panel to punch the Non parody, telling Superduperman that he’s there to get in shape for his own upcoming sequel. The funniest wholly original gag comes in a couplet where Superduperman is rushing off to Paris to save Lotus Lain, only to have to whip around because he forgot France is eastward.

Really effective comedy is based on surprise, and I think that’s pretty indicative of why I fell out of love with Mad parodies as I got older – they’re all pretty much the same, pretty predictable. Even at this point, in 1981, the good parts of the magazine were the things that didn’t parody a specific story, like Don Martin’s strips, Sergio Aragones’ marginals, and of course, “Spy Vs. Spy.”

Cracked, meanwhile, again chose not to do a direct parody of Superman II, instead choosing to run a three-page gag piece called “What Christopher Reeve (That Super Man) Will Be Like When He Gets Old.” The joke here is that, with Superman II being a huge hit, they assumed that they would go on to make dozens and dozens of sequels for decades to come, and the comic jokes about what an “old” Superman would be like: his powers being less impressive, using his strength to break a pound of spaghetti rather than bend steel, for example. The jokes were fair for the time – this was the era where movie sequels were just starting to get out of hand, and once popular movie franchise hit a certain point, there was an assumption that it would go on forever. (Remember the bit in Back to the Future Part II where Marty cringes from the holographic shark advertising Jaws 19, or the quick joke in Spaceballs in which a movie reviewer is about to talk about Rocky 5,000?) The problem here is obvious, and not at all the fault of anybody who worked on this comic: no matter how good the jokes may have seemed at the time, given what happened to Christopher Reeve, they’re just not funny anymore.

I want to note, briefly, that I’m going to try to cover as many Superman parodies as I can before this week is up, but that number is dependent on what’s actually available to me in my personal collection or the DC app, and also on my ability to locate them. I’ve scrouged up quite a few, but that doesn’t mean that I’ve identified them all. I bring that up because if Cracked did parodies of movies past Superman II, I either don’t have them or can’t find them. From here on out, the remaining print parodies on my list are all Mad.

Mad #243, for example, teamed Drucker with writer Stan Hart for “Stuporman ZZZ.” Changing up the writer didn’t change up the formula, though – it’s still your average beat-for-beat Mad parody. Each panel has that same ol’ rhythm, the same ol’ cadence, the same ol’ delivery. And once again, the funniest part is the stuff that’s NOT directly taken from the film: this time around, it’s a sequence after the “Kraptonite” makes Stuporman go bad, where he demonstrates this by using a joy buzzer to shake the Pope’s hand, giving a whoopee cushion to the UN Secretary-General, and mooning Ronald and Nancy Reagan at the White House. Reading these stories actually makes me feel sorry for Mort Drucker – he’s such a fantastic cartoonist and caricaturist, and I wish he’d been given better material to illustrate. Even the two-page “Don Martin’s Superman III Outtakes” strip is funnier than the main story. 

I’m starting to get a little burned out on the Mad formula now, to the point where I’m looking forward to the point where I get to the parodies that came out after I fell off as a reader. Hopefully by that point, they’ll have discovered a second way to tell a joke. 

Comics: Superman Unlimited #3, Krypto: The Last Dog of Krypton #2, Batman/Superman: World’s Finest #41

Notes: It ain’t all parodies, though, friends. There are still new Superman comics this week, and I’m getting into those today too, starting with Dan Slott and Rafael Albuqueque’s Superman Unlimited #3. Told largely through Krypto’s eyes, in this issue we see our best boy catch some bad guys, get taken for a walk by Jon, and then catch scent of an old foe of Superman’s that he decides to track down.

At first, the story seems like a charming but inconsequential chapter of the Unlimited storyline. The first two issues largely dealt with the enormous Kryptonite meteor that fell to Earth and the havoc it’s wreaking everywhere, but that plotline doesn’t show up here for quite some time. The Krypto story is lovely, and there’s a great scene where Lois and Clark ask Jon what exactly he’s doing with himself these days (a question a lot of the readers are asking too – the character has been painfully aimless for entirely too long, and I’m not shy about laying the blame for that on the stupid age-up foisted on him during the Bendis run). In the last third of the book, though, there’s a nice reveal where we come to understand how the Krypto story is fitting in. Some new wrinkles to the Kryptonite story are added and a new player is added to the game, and that makes this book – which was already fun to read – feel much more significant. 

Ryan North and Mike Norton are back for Krypto: The Last Dog of Krypton #2. I have no doubt that this miniseries owes its existence to the fact that Krypto has such a big role in the movie, and I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if DC didn’t even have any intention of publishing a Krypto series until after he showed up in the trailer last December and got such a huge response. If that’s true, then that trailer has given us one of the best comics of the year. 

In this second issue, Krypto has been taken in by – of all people – a young Lex Luthor. Having left his original home of Smallville, Lex is living with relatives he clearly despises and for some reason, decides to take in this stray dog he’s found. The ambition that will mark the adult Lex Luthor is already there, but in this early incarnation, he’s struggling with his morality. This would be a fascinating book even if it weren’t for Krypto. We’re seeing the kind of internal conflict that kind of determines who a character will eventually be – if given the chance for greatness at the expense of having to do something horrific, will they do it? Adult Lex, we know, wouldn’t hesitate, but seeing him at a young enough developmental stage where there’s still a last lingering shred of conscience is fascinating.

People who pick up this comic expecting to see the bounding, joyful Krypto of the movie might be a little put off, but if that’s not all you’re looking for, this comic is really phenomenal. 

Finally, in Batman/Superman: World’s Finest #41, we start with Batman, Robin, and Superman inexplicably transported to Bizarro World. Bizarro World is actually kind of an appropriate element to bring in here in Parody Week, because bad Bizarro stories are kind of like a bad Mad satire: by-the-book tellings of an oaf doing things backwards. The good ones find new twists to put on it, and this one is pretty good. We start off with Robin as the point of view character, which is nice, as he’s never been to Bizarro World before and the sheer panic he goes through uses a normally unflappable character to show just how crazy it is. Then we get to the twist – there’s some sort of pandemic going through the Bizarros that warps their brains and makes them the worst thing a Bizarro can be: normal. Waid finds some fun ways to play with the Bizarro’s backwards nature in this issue, promising a fun story arc. 

Sun. July 20

Comedy Sketches: “Bicycle Repairman” from Monty Python’s Flying Circus Season One, Episode Three, Assorted Saturday Night Live sketches

Notes: Okay, so we’ve taken a look at Superman parodies in comics and cartoons, but what about live action? These, I think, can give us a broader view of how pop culture views the Man of Steel, at least at the time each parody was made. We’ll start off with Monty Python’s “Bicycle Repairman” sketch from 1969. In this bit, we peek in on an inverted world in which everyone is Superman. At least, everyone wears a Superman costume and has padded muscles – we never actually witness any of these Supermen doing anything super. But when trouble happens, in the form of Terry Jones Superman falling off his bicycle, another Superman (Michael Palin) makes a quick change and rushes to save the day as…BICYCLE REPAIRMAN!

The Pythons, of course, were masters of surreal comedy. It doesn’t matter if the sketch makes no logical sense, it’s about the gags and about the underlying subversion that they’re sneaking in. And while this particular sketch doesn’t make any grand political statements, it IS interesting in what it shows us about how superheroes were viewed in 1969. First of all, there’s no particular reason for this sketch to be about Superman. They could have put virtually any superhero costume on the cast and the joke would have been exactly the same. But in 1969, Superman was viewed as the default superhero among most people. It’s who you automatically thought of when you said the word, and so that’s what they went with.

The sketch is also intriguing in how it reflects on one other non-Superman element. In the bit where Bicycle Repairman is (spoiler) repairing the bicycle, we get treated to nonsensical “sound effects” such as “Clink!”, “Inflate!” and “Alter Saddle!” They’re done in the style of the “Bow! Bam!” shots from the 1966 Batman TV show. Between these two things, I think it gives us a fairly accurate depiction of just how the general public viewed superheroes at the end of the 60s.

The rest of the sketches I’ve found all come from Saturday Night Live, although thankfully, they’re sometimes decades apart, so I think that gives us an interesting overview of the topic. We’re starting with the “Superhero Party” sketch from 1979, starring Margot Kidder herself as Lois Lane and Bill Murray as Superman, hosting their first party together. 

We get an all-star roundup of comedians playing comic book characters in this one: Dan Akroyd as the Flash, John Belushi as the Hulk (who rotates being Grand Marshall of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade with Green Lantern) and Jane Curtain popping in as a delightfully catty Lana Lang who tries to convince Lois that Clark Kent is secretly the Flash (apparently Superman still hasn’t told her his secret identity, despite having been married for some time). Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, and the Thing all show up in off-the-rack costumes that conceal the presumed extras wearing them. The gem here is Garrett Morris as Ant-Man, a character who, at the time, was as D-list as you could get. I’m sure most of the audience watching this when it aired in 1979 assumed it was a fake character the SNL writers made up. Murray ducks out at one point and returns as “Clark Kent,” where Lois starts confiding to her old pal that life with Superman has become stiflingly dull. What really crushes his spirit, though, is finding out that Lois used to date the Hulk. 

This sketch is full of hilarious, little moments. Murray prances around, “flying” from one spot in the room to another. Lois briefly admonishes him to allow her to open a housewarming gift because “not all of us have X-Ray vision,” and so forth. Unlike the Monty Python example, which just uses a surface level awareness of Superman, the writers of this sketch pull some deep cuts that I’m sure would zip past a lot of people, especially the Ant-Man reference (which nonetheless was so memorable that it got Morris a cameo in the first Ant-Man movie). The ending of the sketch, I confess, is a little weak, but at least it HAS an ending, which is more than you can say for most SNL segments of the past 20 years or so.

In 1985, Christopher Reeve hosted the show. Rather than actually parody Superman himself, though, they took the clever approach of telling the story of the “Superman Auditions.” Jim Belushi plays Richard Donner, auditioning the last three potential actors for the role of his Superman movie, including (of course) Christopher Reeve as himself. The three of them read sides opposite Donner’s assistant (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss). When they run the scene where Clark stops a mugger, Belushi suddenly fires a gun at Reeve. He’s angry when the bullet, rather than bouncing off his chest harmlessly, keeps bouncing off his chin and teeth and breaking windows. Reeve turns out to be at a serious disadvantage compared to the other two auditioners, one of whom catches the bullet in his teeth and the other of which is promptly shot dead. 

The concept is so utterly absurd that it’s actually kind of delightful, and while nothing about it makes the slightest bit of sense, I keep laughing every time I see it. In terms of mannerisms, Reeve plays his Superman lines just the way he always does, but he keeps bumbling the use of his authentic super powers in a way that seems appropriate for his Clark Kent. And this time the punchline at the end of the sketch lands nicely. 

The next sketch is VERY much of its time, “Superman’s Funeral” from 1992. As I mentioned waaaay back when I did my reread of the Death of Superman for this blog, it was big news – so big that it even inspired an SNL sketch. You have to understand, the “Superhero Party” and “Superman Auditions” sketches were 100 percent done just because they had Kidder and Reeve hosting the show, and when that happens, they tend to play off of some of the actor’s best-known characters. But that doesn’t apply to “Superman’s Funeral.” They did this bit just because it was such an enormous part of the cultural zeitgeist at just that moment. (Also in the zeitgeist: that episode’s host, comedian Sinbad.)

Superman, as you may expect, doesn’t actually appear in this bit. We instead have Rob Schneider as Jimmy Olsen acting as host for Superman’s funeral. He talks to the other heroes as they arrive: Aquaman (David Spade), Adam Sandler (the Flash), Tim Meadows (Green Lantern). Dana Carvey’s Batman breaks down in tears during the eulogy, leading to Robin (Chris Rock) trying to comfort him on the dais. Lex Luthor (Al Franken) ultimately has to confess that he’s actually pretty happy about the whole thing. Perry White (the immortal Phil Hartman) gives a speech where he can do little more than burble “Great Caesar’s Ghost!” over and over again. Chris Farley as the Hulk (some people from Marvel Comics came by to pay their respects) hilariously switches from incoherent Hulk-speech to being an erudite speaker when he switches to his notecards. And then at the end, Jimmy rushes in and reports that the Legion of Doom is attacking the Metropolis Arena. Batman quickly mobilizes the rest of the heroes to rush off and thwart them. The surprisingly touching moment (“Let’s do it for Superman!”) is slightly undercut – in traditional SNL style – by showing Black Lightning (Sinbad) swiping food from the catering table.

Again, I’m impressed by some of the details in this bit. Tim Meadows, for instance, wears a costume that’s actually accurate to what John Stewart was wearing in the comics at the time, as opposed to the standard GL uniform. And Sinbad’s Black Lightning is incensed at the fact that nobody at the funeral seems to know who he is. (This was funnier in 1992, before the character had his own television series.) 

On the other hand, they weren’t married to modern continuity either. Lois Lane (Julia Sweeney) is confused that Clark Kent hasn’t shown up for the funeral. Given that most of the public, at this point, probably weren’t aware that Lois was in on the secret by now or that she and Clark were engaged, it’s a forgivable omission. I love this sketch. I remember watching it when it originally aired, being dumbfounded by the fact that stuff from comic books – from my comics, that I was reading – were actually being spoofed by SNL. And to be frank, this is what I consider their Golden Age, the era of Hartman, Carvey, Mike Myers and so forth. Once those guys left, the show fell off, and I’ve honestly never found it to be consistently funny ever since then. Does that make me sound like a grumpy old man? Well, what can I say? When you’re right, you’re right. 

Future Black Adam Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson took on the Man of Steel in 2000 in a sketch called “Clark Kent.” (Oddly enough, unlike the other sketches, this one doesn’t appear to be available on YouTube. We’ll have to content ourselves with a random TikTok capture of it.) In this one, after Superman zips away from the Daily Planet, the newspaper staff (featuring Molly Shannon as Lois Lane, Jimmy Fallon as Jimmy Olsen, and Chris Parnell as Perry White) begrudgingly wait for Johnson’s Clark Kent to appear, like he always does. As he walks onto the scene, his Superman costume ridiculously poking out from beneath his suit, the others all crack up over how his pathetic attempts to conceal his secret identity. 

That’s the whole joke in this sketch – the rest of the Planet staffers are painfully aware that Superman and Clark are the same person and constantly mock him behind his back. It’s a funny bit, too – while I think people don’t give the character enough credit for how he pulls off the masquerade (shown most effectively by Christopher Reeve and in the All Star Superman series), the joke is actually kind of funny at first. It does lapse into being a little mean-spirited as the three of them delight in screwing with him, not to mention some seriously dated jokes where they try to rile “Clark” by claiming “Superman” might be gay. This whole sketch is kind of endemic of SNL, though – a premise that has some potential, but that quickly spirals into jokes that tend to be more nasty than funny, then falling short at the end.

Finally, late last year, SNL dropped a sketch on YouTube that had apparently been cut for time earlier in the season, John Mulaney and Sarah Sherman as Superman and Lois, in an “alternate version” of the famous interview from the 1978 film. The bit starts off the same as the scene from the film, with Superman arriving at Lois’s apartment in the hopes of answering some of the questions the public may have about him, only to be interrupted by the sudden appearance of Lois’s heretofore unmentioned roommate Glenn (Chloe Fineman). Fineman shows up wearing an awful wig and an oversized bikini t-shirt, then stumbles into mispronouncing “Superman” as though it were a last name. From there Fineman just gets more and more debauched and inappropriate as Superman and Lois desperately attempt to conduct the interview.

I’m a big fan of John Mulaney. He’s one of the best stand-up performers in the public eye these days, he’s a GREAT voice actor (I loved him as Spider-Ham in Into the Spider-Verse), and if you’ve never seen his routine about the fun he and a friend had with a jukebox when they were kids, stop right now and watch it on YouTube. But the sketch just doesn’t work. The joke – the ONLY joke – is that Lois’s roommate is a debaucherous idiot. Not a FUNNY idiot, just an idiot. The only thing resembling humor comes towards the end when Superman tries to fly Lois away and is surprised to find her heavier than he expected. (It’s funny, you see, because she’s seen him lift a tank with his little finger.) The rest of it…John Mulaney deserves better. Hell, everyone in this sketch deserves better. I don’t know who wrote this sketch or who approved it, but the only person at SNL who was doing their job that week is the person who decided to cut it for time. 

Animated Short: She-Sick Sailors (1944)

Notes: There’s one more cartoon I forgot to cover the other day, and as I doubt I’ll have a chance before this week ends, I’m gonna squeeze it in now. Seymour Kneitel, who directed several of the Fleischer Superman shorts, had one more shot at the character in 1944, in the Popeye cartoon She-Sick Sailors. When Popeye discovers that Olive Oyl is enamored of the Superman comic books (delightfully, complete with the Fleischer Superman anthem), Bluto decides to cut in on Popeye’s action by putting on a Superman costume, shaving his beard off, and impersonating the Man of Steel. From there, we get your average Popeye short, with the sailor and Bluto sparring over Olive’s affections, but with an added Superman element.

I love this short. It’s a perfect Popeye cartoon, using the formula to a tee, but at the same time it still manages to crack jokes about Superman himself and the expectations of the character, largely informed by the cartoons that the same studio had recently finished making. And it’s all worth it all just to hear Popeye deliver the line “Listen here, Stupidman! Ya still has ta proves ta ME that you’re a better man than I am!” 

Mon., July 21

Magazines: Mad #415, Mad #468, #524

Notes: I’m jumping ahead now to 2002, and a Mad parody of a piece of Superman lore we’ve only briefly touched upon here so far: Smallville. Their “Smellville” parody (with art, once more, by the great Mort Drucker, written by Dick Debartolo), starts with the usual Mad Magazine double-page spread where we get a Mousketeer Roll Call of the cast, each giving us a brief description of who they are, their function on the show, and the only joke that the magazine seems to think the character is capable of providing.

It’s funny to notice some of the assumptions that this parody made about the show, which was still very early in its run when it was published. That opening double-paged spread, for instance, features caricatures of Margot Kidder and Teri Hatcher, each claiming they’re planning to be Lois Lane when they graduate. It feels like the writer is leaning on a prediction that Lois would eventually be revealed to be a Smallville High Student, but that of course didn’t happen. On the other hand, wondering what the impetus was behind that specific gag is more satisfying than reading the “satire” actually is. 

The parody is only five pages long and utterly bereft of story. We get assorted vignettes that show bits and pieces of scenes from the show’s first season, a running gag about “weird stuff” happening in Smellville on Tuesday nights between 9 and 10 pm (which admittedly is amusing the first time they do it, but less funny each subsequent time), and then the whole thing ends abruptly with the iconic scene of Clark lashed to a scarecrow. This reads like a parody written by someone who hasn’t watched any of Smallville except for the commercials, taking a wild shot at what probably happens. This is arguably the weakest Mad parody we’ve seen yet.

Mad took a swipe at Superman Returns in 2006. Dick Debartolo returns for this one, with art by Tom Richmond. Here we have “Spider-Sham” recruited to narrate “Stuporman Returns,” the joke being that Mad wanted a hero who actually had a movie come out in this century to get people’s attention. (I’ll concede, that’s actually pretty funny.) From there, we get a quick recap of the original Superman (or at least the parts of it that were pertinent to Superman Returns), then we land on the joke the magazine has settled on for this one: Returns is just a retread of elements from the original movie. Which honestly is pretty fair for a satire of Superman Returns, but also pretty goddamn hypocritical for Mad Magazine, which from what I can tell abandoned its quest to develop a second joke somewhere around 1987. 

There are good things to say. This one, unlike Smellville, actually has a story to it, although it is buoyed by the fact that it simply has to do the cut-and-paste, beat-by-beat recreation of the movie, so actually having a plot is no mean feat. Richmond’s art is pretty good as well, showing skills at caricature that match Drucker’s. Also, apparently Mad switched from black and white to full color some time between 2002 and 2006, which is earlier than I thought, and the color actually looks very good. 

The last two panels are probably the funniest in the comic. There’s a good joke about the show House (which was a hit at the time), and a final panel playing on the weird ambiguity of Lois’s son, complete with a visual reference to Action Comics #1, which I’m sure will make certain collectors I know scramble to find a copy of this issue once they realize it.

It’s not great. It’s not particularly funny. But at least it’s better than “Smellville.”

The last issue of Mad I’m going to subject myself to before their reboot is their Man of Steel parody from issue #524 in 2013. In “Man of Veal” (because puns don’t actually have to be funny, they just have to rhyme), we get the by-the-book recap of the feature film that it’s satirizing, as is to be expected. However, I’ve got something surprising to say:

Some of the jokes in this one are actually pretty good.

However, not enough to make up for the ones that are absolutely horrific. 

For example, there are some truly tasteless, vulgar jokes in here about Taylor Swift (and I don’t even care if you’re making fun of Taylor Swift, I care that the joke ISN’T FUNNY). Another panel about the sexual proclivities of Kryptonians (Kraptonians? Oh, who cares?) that isn’t even close to amusing enough to justify how gross it is. Digs at comic book readers that come out of nowhere. And when their Lois Lane shows up (I can’t even be bothered to flip back to see what pseudonym they used), she’s a painful straw feminist stereotype, prancing around and talking about femininity in terms that feel like they could have come from one of the Spice Girls at their most annoying. Is that what they thought Amy Adams was doing? It boggles the mind.

Despite the enthusiasm I had for Parody Week when I started, subjecting myself to one painful Mad garbagefest after another has made me start to regret the whole thing. 

Tues. July 22

Magazines: Mad Magazine Vol. 2 #15, #44

Notes: At some point in their long history, the parent company of Mad Magazine was sold to Warner Bros, which of course also owns DC Comics, and the stewardship of Mad was handed over to them. In 2018, they decided to relaunch the magazine with a new first issue, because somehow there are still people who think that’s a positive thing. I’ve actually never read an issue of the “new” Mad before today, but as I started to look for entries for Parody Week, I discovered that the current state of the magazine seems to be a mixture of classic features and reprints, which I find surprisingly sad. Maybe because I don’t have a ton of faith in the reprints they have to choose from. But after some sifting around, I managed to find a couple of issues of the current Mad on the DC app that have Superman-centric spoofs.

And may Rao have mercy on my soul.

Mad Vol. 2 #15, from 2020, has several superhero-centric reprints, including spoofs of the X-Men, Spider-Man, and others. There are a few Superman shorts in here, including a Sergio Aragones classic where Superman proves, to his chagrin, that he is in fact more powerful than a locomotive. The highlight of the issue, without question, is Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood’s “Bat Boy and Rubin” parody from 1953 – the same era and creative team that gave us the original “Superduperman” (which is also included as a “digital extra” in this issue). Then, just last month, issue #44 of the magazine gave us a mostly-Superman issue, with reprints of their parodies of the original Superman, Superman Returns, and Supergirl (which I didn’t read before). There are also a few new Superman strips, the best of which is “The Further Adventures of That Guy From the Cover of Action Comics #1.” The gag there is simply photoshopping “that guy” into various other comic book covers, but it’s actually pretty inventive. Or maybe I’ve just been desensitized. 

This last issue that I’m going to cover this week makes a few things very clear, though. “Petit’s Law of Satire: Satire is funnier in broad strokes than in specifics,” is absolutely true. The funniest strips and shorts are invariably the ones that aren’t trying to zero in on a retelling of a specific story, but just use the tropes and concepts of what they’re mocking to do something original. 

Look at the greats: Mel Brooks and the Zuckers did their greatest work parodying an entire genre like sci-fi (Spaceballs), westerns (Blazing Saddles) and disaster movies (Airplane). Even Young Frankenstein wasn’t a retelling of the original story, but a new one that built upon it. The same holds true in literature. Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy parodies sci-fi, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld uses fantasy tropes as a launchpad to parody any number of topics. If Adams had just tried to do a retelling of Star Trek or Pratchett had tried to copy Lord of the Rings, I doubt we’d still be reading either of their works today. Does anyone remember Star Wreck, a series of very Trek-specific parody books that came out in the 80s and 90s? No, just me? Thought so. 

What’s more, I think that something else that’s pretty true has become evident to me: parody is also funnier if it’s loving. (Satire does NOT have to be loving, but parody and satire aren’t exactly the same thing.) The funniest things I’ve read this week were “Superduperman” and John Byrne’s “Superbman Vs. the Fantastical Four,” neither of which gave me the impression that they were being made by someone who disliked their target. They loved them enough, in fact, to have a deeper understanding of them that made the humor ring true. The worst of the Mad parodies, on the other hand, are nasty, mean-spirited hit pieces that seem to have been written by somebody who resents the original material for the crime of existing. Similarly, the best SNL sketches are the earlier ones. The ones with Margot Kidder and Christopher Reeve both show some affection, and the “Superman’s Funeral” bit feels like there’s actual love behind it. 

I’m sorry, folks – of all the theme weeks I planned out for this year, I was terribly unprepared how much of a dud this one would turn out to be. There have to be better Superman parodies out there that I’m not aware of. If you know of any, please let me know. I’d be happy to return to this topic in the future, as soon as we stumble across some parodies that are actually…you know…funny. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. You can join in the Kryptonian Konversation every day in the Year of Superman Facebook Group!