Though he listed his life ambition in his high-school yearbook as "neurosurgeon," as an undergraduate at Washington University in St . Louishe shunned organic chemistry and began writing parodic plays.
Witness the Sunday Times reviewer of Wild, who said her highly charged writing "reminds one... of the lush parodic prose of Cold Comfort Farm".
When the editorial managers went on a European trip, the three took advantage of the situation, writing articles mocking the local theatre establishment and offering parodic commentary on a variety of topics, such as the effect of Canadian hockey on United States fashion.
For some years, I wrote the parodic Bel Littlejohn column in the Guardian.
Michael Deacon, in The Telegraph, wrote a parodic profile that included sentences like: "Renowned author Dan Brown smiled, the ends of his mouth curving upwards in a physical expression of pleasure".
He started writing and performing while an undergraduate at Harvard ("Fight Fiercely, Harvard," a parodic college fight song, dates from 1945), and he continued clowning through his graduate studies in math.
Her own letters are so full of comic set pieces, vivid narrative, and wonderfully replicated speech (including a whole page of parodic Southern palaver written out during a 1961 visit to the Durrs) that one wonders why Mitford never tried writing a novel.
A sister-in-law writes, in a parodic effort to cheer him up, that someday perhaps everyone will speak Romanian.
In some sense, Appelfeld has written a dark parodic version of Sholom Aleichem's "Railroad Stories". Those exuberant tales, written at the beginning of the century, are all set on trains traveling through Russia.
It's about Henry Luce, the founder of Time magazine, and it's written in a parodic imitation of that magazine's then-famous prose style; it also happened to be a salvo in the epic rivalry between Luce and The New Yorker's founding editor, Harold Ross.
