Popular Culture Review Vol. 26, No. 1, Winter 2015 | Page 76

Productive Parody on Sesam e Street In viewing numerous Sesame Street parody segments, I found that these parodies function in a number of different ways, including, but not limited to, teaching children to count, add, subtract, recite the alphabet, recognize body parts, and even be conscientious about their hygiene habits. These short video segments are content-driven and generally humorous and light-hearted in nature. While I do argume that Sesame Street provides us with great examples of productive parody, I cannot ignore the fact that the show is also meant to entertain; therefore, not all parody segments are productive in the sense of directly providing content meant to educate, but I have yet to find any aspect of these segments (or the show itself) that fails to entertain. Thus, even if a parody piece is not clearly indicative of having embedded a particular literacy lesson for children, its secondary function is to parody simply for entertainment purposes; though, examples of “entertainment only” parodies on Sesame Street are the exception and not the rule. Sesame Street’s Monsterpiece Theater, hosted by Cookie Monster as Alistair Cook ie, is a parody of PBS’ Masterpiece Theatre, whose original show host was British personality Alistair Cooke. Monsterpiece mimics the format of Masterpiece Theater, not only in its host persona, but also in its introduction and broadcast of a variety of classic works. Sesame Street uses the platform of Monsterpiece Theater as fertile ground by which to parody a number of classic and popular works in film, television, literature and theatre. Generally, each Monsterpiece segment begins with an introduction by Alistair Cookie, which is then followed by a parody sketch and subsequently ends with Cookie’s closing remarks and possible mention regarding a future episode. Monsterpiece Theater is itself a parody of a classic British television series and the sketches shown within the segment are yet another parody, which in turn makes this popular Sesame Street segment function as a dual parody or a parody within a parody. I viewed a total of fifteen Monsterpiece episodes that parodied four films, two television shows, three plays, four musicals and two books. There are many more episodes, but I will limit discussion to those that I viewed. Only two episodes (i.e., “Waiting for Elmo” and “Twin Beaks”) out of the fifteen were primarily entertainment for adults, rather than education for children. Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot and David Lynch surrealist TV drama Twin Peaks, are somewhat difficult texts to comprehend and Sesame Street’s parody of these works 72