Spoofs, lampoons and parodies have been around for as long as cinema. Take a look at how they started, why they’ve stuck around and how they tell us more about ourselves than we think.
It was only when the trailers for the new Naked Gun film started dropping that I realised it’s been ages since I’ve seen a new spoof movie. And it got me thinking why that is.
And it’s weird because in an age of memes, rapid pop-culture trends and the internet, you’d think they’d be thriving. But somewhere along the way, the genre went from being clever chaos to lazy pointing-and-laughing. The joke stopped being “this is a perfect imitation of the thing we’re mocking” and just turned into full blown ‘Member Berries. And it goes to show that despite being celebrated and critiqued as dumb fun, there’s a lot to the art of a good spoof movie.
So with them potentially having another stab at the mainstream with Naked Gun and the upcoming Spaceballs sequel, I thought we’d take a look at the brief history of spoof movies.
Before the glory days, spoofs really were little side hustles in the comedy world. In the silent film era, directors and actors were already poking fun at the very genres they were helping to popularise. Mud and Sand, for example, wasn’t some abstract art-house experiment—it was a direct parody of the wildly popular Blood and Sand starring Rudolph Valentino. Valentino’s film had audiences swooning over his tragic matador, but Mud and Sand brought in Stan Laurel to send the whole thing up. Laurel’s version wasn’t subtle about it either: exaggerated posturing, comically oversized bullfighting props, and over-the-top romantic gazes that went on for so long you could practically hear the cameraman sighing. It was all about blowing the drama up to cartoon levels until it became ridiculous.
Laurel and Hardy, even before becoming the iconic duo, were constantly smuggling parody into their shorts. Take The Battle of the Century – ostensibly a boxing comedy, but with a pie fight finale so absurdly overblown it felt like a parody of slapstick itself. They knew audiences had seen the “one pie in the face” gag before, so they escalated it into a literal food war, turning a simple joke into an anarchic set piece that mocked the idea of restraint.
And this wasn’t just an American thing. Across the pond, British filmmakers like Fred Evans were lampooning popular serials and action adventures as early as the 1910s, dressing up the clichés of cliffhangers and dastardly villains in deliberately shoddy costumes to highlight how formulaic they’d become. These films didn’t have “spoof” in the marketing—they were often billed as comedies—but anyone who’d seen the originals knew exactly what was going on.
The 1960s saw the next evolution in what we’d call the classic spoof movie. Spy mania was everywhere, with James Bond primed for some ribbing (and some lines that already sound like parody). Enter Casino Royale, and I can’t overstate this—it is chaos in cinematic form. This wasn’t part of the “real” Bond canon, but rather a bizarre rights loophole project that roped in some of the biggest stars of the day, then threw them into a blender without bothering to read the instruction manual. The film had five directors—which is never a good sign—and felt less like a cohesive story and more like a series of disconnected fever dreams stitched together with spy clichés. Peter Sellers played one version of James Bond, but reportedly refused to share scenes with Orson Welles, who was playing the villain Le Chiffre. Woody Allen popped up as a neurotic, hopelessly unqualified Bond villain named Jimmy Bond, which, yes, was exactly as weird as it sounds. There were lavish sets, psychedelic visuals, musical numbers, and enough tonal whiplash to give you a migraine.
And yet, for all its messiness, Casino Royale proved a point: audiences would pay good money to watch big, glossy franchises get roasted on the big screen. People didn’t need these parodies to be tightly plotted, they wanted the spectacle of seeing something as polished and cool as Bond dismantled in front of them. They wanted the spy world turned inside out, where instead of infallible super-agents, you got bumbling wannabes, self-absorbed megalomaniacs, and jokes about seduction so ridiculous they made the real thing look tame.
That same decade, Mel Brooks was lurking in the wings, ready to detonate the whole genre. His Blazing Saddles didn’t just parody Westerns; it blew them up from the inside. It was filthy, politically razor-sharp, and still somehow full of fart jokes. He didn’t bother with subtlety. Then Young Frankenstein took classic horror and somehow made it both a perfect imitation of the original style and screamingly funny. Brooks wasn’t making fun of the genres, he was making fun within them. That’s the secret sauce. His High Anxiety did the same for Hitchcock thrillers, lovingly recreating the vibe while still cramming in sight gags, wordplay, and the kind of jokes your mum pretends not to laugh at.
And then Airplane! crashes onto the scene in 1980, and basically set the formula for the rest of time. The Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker trio (or ZAZ) took a dusty old disaster movie script (Zero Hour! from 1957) and turned it into one of the funniest movies in cinematic history. Puns, visual gags, absurdist dialogue, and that golden rule: everyone plays it straight. That’s why Leslie Nielsen is basically the GOAT of spoofs. His total sincerity is exactly why it works. Airplane! was so successful it basically created its own comedy language.
From there, ZAZ doubled down. Police Squad! (a short-lived TV series) was too good for television, so it morphed into The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! in 1988. This was a pure distillation of the spoof formula: constant joke density, sight gags hidden in the background, running jokes that reward rewatching, and Nielsen’s deadpan face holding the whole thing together as Frank Drebin.
Meanwhile, Brooks wasn’t exactly slowing down. Spaceballs nailed the sci-fi tropes so hard that I honestly quote it nearly as much as Star Wars. You had Rick Moranis as Dark Helmet, John Candy as Barf, and a plot that riffed on Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien, and even Planet of the Apes. Brooks made sure nothing was safe, right down to the gag about “Spaceballs: The Flamethrower” as part of the film’s meta-merchandising joke, which somehow feels even more accurate now than ever..
Over in the early 90s, Jim Abrahams, fresh from the ZAZ powerhouse, was proving that action movies were just as ripe for skewering as disaster flicks and cop dramas. Hot Shots! was a laser-focused send-up of Top Gun, complete with Charlie Sheen as Topper Harley, a hotshot pilot with the emotional range of a brick and the ego to match. The film nailed every sweaty, slow-motion, over-scored, flag-waving cliché of 80s action cinema. Then Hot Shots! Part Deux went even bigger, expanding its aim to Rambo-style war epics. This is the one where Sheen’s body count is literally tallied on screen like a video game, and where Saddam Hussein gets roasted by the end. Both films kept the ZAZ DNA of straight-faced delivery and relentless joke density, proving that even in an era of big-budget blockbuster chest-thumping, there was still room for the spoof.
Then the 2000s happened, and things got messy. Scary Movie kicked off a fresh wave, lampooning horror clichés and early 2000s culture. And at least the first two are certified classics, with characters that you actually remembered and cared about. But then came the “Movie” movies, Date Movie, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, that thought throwing recognisable costumes on actors and making them fall over was enough. There was no love or reference for the source material, and it made them feel like hollow cash grabs.
A few gems broke through the noise. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is one of the most underrated spoofs ever made, and Black Dynamite is one of my favourite movies of all time. I’m pretty sure me and my uni buddies watched it every week for a little while. And then Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping brought the Lonely Island’s sharp, self-aware comedy to the mockumentary format, showing there was still room for fresh takes.
But the big, tentpole spoof? The one that dominates the conversation and crosses over into mainstream pop culture? That’s been missing for years. And now, here we are. At time of writing I’ve not seen the new Naked Gun, but I’m hoping it helps to capture that magic of a genre that’s been present since the dawn of cinema, but disappointingly quiet in recent years.
Spoof movies have always been a time capsule. Airplane! gives you the essence of late-70s disaster films. Spaceballs is a love letter to and roast of the Star Wars era. Scary Movie is the early 2000s horror scene frozen in amber. They don’t just make you laugh—they tell you exactly what people were watching, talking about, and rolling their eyes at in a given year. The good ones feel timeless because even when you don’t get every reference, the absurdity carries you along.
While you’re here, please subscribe to Upside Down Shark on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts!
Tom Baker
I like Star Wars, heavy metal and BBQ Pringles.
