This article examines the popular phenomenon of news parodies using the concept of genre. While genre is often used as a category of industrial production and marketing, the author argues that Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of genre as a socially embedded aesthetic form allows us to understand the proliferation of news parodies as a commentary on the social authority of the news. Comparing examples from Canada, the UK, and the United States, the article argues that the political significance of intertextual social communication resides in the doubleness of texts that ask an audience to recognize the problems of official forms of culture while simultaneously possibly reinscribing their dominance. The article offers a comparison of shows that merely parody the news with those that actually satirize politics, and ends with a discussion of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report and their particular significance as daily news parodies.
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