Last week I featured the wonderful Canadian band, Walk Off the Earth, who gained fame with their amazing cover of Gotye’s song, Somebody That I Used to Know:
I also shared a parody of the song done by The Key of Awesome, which I found quite funny:
The Key of Awesome specializes in song parodies, and has quite a few of them posted to their YouTube channel. Warning: if you visit the site, two hours will go by in a blink of an eye.
While I was browsing through their videos, I came across this great one, a parody of the Rihanna/Kanye West/Paul McCartney song, Four Five Seconds:
If you are not familiar with the original (one of my favorite songs), here it is. Once you watch it, perhaps you’ll be even more impressed with the parody:
And I guess it’s a tribute to how popular the original video was (over 400 million views), that there were other parodies besides The Key to Awesome version. Here is one by Bart Baker, another popular producer of song parodies; this one has over 8 million views:
In my mind, the original creator of song parodies is Weird Al Yankovic, who started creating such songs in the early 1980s. Here is his parody of the Backstreet Boys song I Want It That Way:
and if you are not familiar with the original Backstreet Boys version:
And here’s one last parody, a relatively short one, by Brock’s Dubs:
The parody has over 46 million views, but the original has 136 million:
While some of these parodies may not appeal to your sense of humor, I find them all pretty funny. Most of all I admire the creativity of not only the original artists, but of those who create the parodies. It seems that parody is a form of art in and of itself, and I think all these creators owe a debt of gratitude to Weird Al for getting things started.
*image of Weird Al from grammy.com
Borden's Blather 
My nephew was a Weird Al fan, so I am familiar with a lot of his music. I can’t say I like a lot of his music, but I do like I Lost on Jeopardy. I appreciated you introducing me to Walk off the Earth last week as I had never heard of them. Their stuff is amazing!
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I’m the same way with Weird Al, some of his stuff is OK, most I don’t find too funny. I’ll have to check out the Jeopardy one. And as far as Walk Off the Earth, I’ve been listening to their music all week – it is great stuff.
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Parodies are amusing, indeed. There are a handful of Weird Al songs I really like.
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When the parodies are done well, they are as good as, if not better than, the original. Weird Al has put out a lot of parodies, and there are a few I find pretty funny.
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I love parodies and these are so funny!
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