Greg Smith and Dan Harries talk about parody, but I wonder if it might
not be appropriate to talk about irony. That there's some mechanism
triggered by an aspect of style--whether visual, verbal, narrative, or
whatever--that leads us to recognize that things are not what they
seem. So the 14-year-old unaware of Freud (an avatar of Bowie!!!) can
recognize that "something's going on" without knowing precisely what.
I don't mean to quibble about terms, but I think the mechanism operates
without the presence of parody also.
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