Ask Lemmy

This is such a quality question. But a lot of people are just naming their favorite movies in the comments.

What you want is Moore's Watchmen. It is a deconstruction and reconstruction of the Superhero as an American trope.

What I loved about HBO's continuation is that they focused on how white supremacy is intertwined with heroism, just as Moore wrote in his original IP.

Then you got the Zack Snyder movie which was mostly, "ooh, look at these people with powers fight crime". None of the impending doom of the fall of society from nuclear war and/or fascism, and how the heroes were pointless because they were the ones pushing forward this doom. "Who watches the Watchmen?" etc.

Cool supplementary article: https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/books/watchmen-creator-alan-moore-says-superhero-genre-remains-a-white-supremacist-dream-of-the-master-race

'The 3 Musketeers' with Raquel Welch and Oliver Reed. Completely aware of how ridiculous all this nonsense is, and loving it.

The Orville

The more I watch of 'Succession' the more I think it is close to perfect in terms of family/executive drama. It started almost as cringe inducingly funny as say 'The Office' but it has just become amazingly accurate and dramatic. Recommended.

"Cabin in the Woods" kind of fits.

The anime Knosuba.

Meant to be a parody of the whole "stuck in a fantasy world" genre, while being a great example of it.

Walk Hard The Dewey Cox Story

Not a funny watch but I'd consider Neo Genesis Evangelion a great deconstruction of the Gundam genre.

Not a movie, book, or TV show, but Jethro Tull's "Thick as a Brick" was supposed to be satirizing progressive rock, and turned into one of the best prog songs/albums ever made.

Konosuba. It's a parody of the Isekai Anime genre. And holy shit is it funny 🤌🏼.

Isekai refers to the trope in many popular anime where the main character or MC (majorly a male, also majorly either socially awkward, inept or both) either dies in the real world and somehow gets reincarnated/transported, or plays a VR game or reads a book that sucks them into that world.

These shows tend to have many recurring cliches; a harem of attractive women that all want the attention of the MC, MC being essentially OP at whatever fantasy world skill structure exists, shitloads of fan service (mostly overly sexual portrayal of the women in those worlds, but also random and long action sequences), overly complicated rules that they will somehow obey and many many more. I'll be here all year listing each trope.

But Konosuba mocks the concept of the Isekai genre, and actively makes sure to do something that wouldn't occur in a typical show.

What ended up happening was that in their quest to make the perfect parody, they ended up striking gold, and created one of the best Isekai shows. All because they wanted to make fun of that exact genre.

It's not even like they "became the very thing they swore to destroy", since the show doesn't at all take itself too seriously...

There's 2 seasons, a movie and a spin-off prequel that follows one of the main characters and leads upto the first episode of the main story. All of which is amazing and insanely hilarious.

100% recommended.

Genre satire is different than political satire in that most people who make it often do so out of love for the genre not hated. In fact these works of media aren't nearly as funny if you aren't familiar with the tropes and story beats within a genre, so the audience also ends up being fans. The people who watch slasher parodies are the same people who enjoy slashers.

I like Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, a farcical noir film that is like a quilt made from the footage of a bunch of other films with original fabric connecting the pieces.