A self-parody is a parody of oneself or one's own work. As an artist accomplishes it by imitating his or her own characteristics, a self-parody is potentially difficult to distinguish from especially characteristic productions (exempli gratia: a situation in which a litterateur's mannerisms are typically ponderous, sesquipedalian, and Latinizing).
Sometimes critics use the word figuratively to mean the artist's style and preoccupations appear as strongly (and perhaps as ineptly) in some work as they would in a parody. Such works may result from habit, self-indulgence, or an effort to please an audience by providing something familiar. Ernest Hemingway has frequently been a target for such comments. An example from Paul Johnson's book Intellectuals:
Some [of Hemingway's later writing] was published nonetheless, and was seen to be inferior, even a parody of his earlier work. There were one or two exceptions, notably The Old Man and the Sea, though there was an element of self-parody in that too.
Political polemicists use the term similarly, as in this headline of a 2004 blog posting. "We Would Satirize Their Debate And Post-Debate Coverage, But They Are So Absurd At This Point They Are Their Own Self-Parody".[1]
Examples of self-parody
The following are deliberate self-parodies or are at least sometimes considered to be so:
In the One Thousand and One Nights, the fictional storyteller Sheherezade sometimes tells folk tales with similar themes and story lines that can be seen as parodies of each other. For example, "Wardan the Butcher's Adventure With the Lady and the Bear" parallels "The King's Daughter and the Ape", "Harun al-Rashid and the Two Slave-Girls" has a similar relationship to "Harun al-Rashid and the Three Slave-Girls" - and "The Angel of Death With the Proud King and the Devout Man" has two possible parodies: "The Angel of Death and the Rich King" and "The Angel of Death and the King of the Children of Israel"1. This observation needs to be tempered by our knowledge of the nature of folk tales, and the way this collection "grew" rather than being deliberately compiled.
Pale Fire, a novel by Vladimir Nabokov in the form of a long, pedantic, self-centered commentary on a much shorter poem. It may parody his commentary on his translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin; the commentary was highly detailed and much longer than the poem.
The song "Chicken in Black", by Johnny Cash, parodies his persona as "the Man in Black". The accompanying video shows Cash robbing a bank dressed as a chicken.
Konami'sParodius series of video games, a parody of Gradius, features many characters from the company's many various series. Parodius is the only series that parodies the other games made by the same company; other companies have made games that parody themselves, but have not dedicated a full-fledged series to self-parody.
The Stargate SG-1 episodes Wormhole X-Treme! and 200 were largely self-parodies filled with in-jokes that celebrated the show's 100th and 200th episodes, respectively.
Alan Menken's song, "That's How You Know" from Enchanted is a self-parody of songs such as "Be our Guest" and "Under the Sea"
A series of Geico car-insurance commercials involve testimonials from customers while celebrities re-iterate the stories their own way. Don LaFontaine presents the story as he would voice a movie trailer, and Joan Rivers periodically comments that she can't feel her face.
Neil Patrick Harris parodies himself in the Harold & Kumar series of comedy films. His persona in the films is that of a partying womanizer. However, he came out as being gay prior to the release of Harold & Kumar: Escape From Guantanamo Bay.
