A self-parody is a parody of oneself or one's own work. As an artist accomplishes it by imitating his or her own characteristics, a self-parody is potentially difficult to distinguish from especially characteristic productions. Self-parody may be used to parody someone else's characteristics, or lacking, by overemphasizing and/or exaggerate ones own. Overemphasis can be made for the prevailing attitude in their life's work, social group, lifestyle and subculture. Including lines and points made by others or by the recipient of the self-parody directing it to a parody of someone else which that other person is likely to remember and can't de-emphasize without frustration. Sometimes critics use the word figuratively to indicate that the artist's style and preoccupations appear as strongly in some work as they would in a parody. Such works may result from habit, self-indulgence, or an effort to please an audience by providing something familiar. An example from Paul Johnson writing about Ernest Hemingway: Political polemicists use the term similarly, as in this headline of a 2004 blog posting. "We Would Satirize Their Debate And Post-Debate Coverage, But They Are So Absurd At This Point They Are Their Own Self-Parody".
Examples of self-parody
The following are deliberate self-parodies or are at least sometimes considered to be so.
Literature
In One Thousand and One Nights, the fictional storyteller Sheherezade sometimes tells folk tales with similar themes and story lines that can be seen as parodies of each other. For example, "Wardan the Butcher's Adventure With the Lady and the Bear" parallels "The King's Daughter and the Ape", "Harun al-Rashid and the Two Slave-Girls" has a similar relationship to "Harun al-Rashid and the Three Slave-Girls" - and "The Angel of Death With the Proud King and the Devout Man" has two possible parodies: "The Angel of Death and the Rich King" and "The Angel of Death and the King of the Children of Israel". This observation needs to be tempered by our knowledge of the nature of folk tales, and the way this collection "grew" rather than being deliberately compiled.
Chaucer's "Tale of Sir Topas" in The Canterbury Tales shows "Geoffrey Chaucer" as a timid writer of doggerel. It has been argued that the tale parodies, among other romances, Chaucer's own Troilus and Criseyde.
Edgar Allan Poe often discussed his own work, sometimes in the form of parody, as in "How to Write a Blackwood Article" and the short story that follows it, "A Predicament".
Pale Fire is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov in the form of a long, pedantic, self-centered commentary on a much shorter poem. It may parody his commentary on his translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, in which the commentary was highly detailed and much longer than the poem. Both the poet and the commentator have been called self-parodies.
The short story "First Law" by Isaac Asimov is said to be a 'spoof' by Asimov himself in The Complete Robot.
Rob Schneider portrays himself in the self-produced sitcom Real Rob, which also stars his real-life wife and child.
Samuel L. Jackson as Agent Neville Flynn in Snakes on a Plane.
Matt LeBlanc plays a satirical version of himself in Episodes.
Video games
In Nintendo's Luigi's Mansion games, the character Professor E. Gadd presents Luigi with a communication device designed as a parody of a Nintendo portable console, as such the "Game Boy Horror" in the original title, the "Duel Scream" in , and the "Virtual Boo" in Luigi's Mansion 3.
