Parody

In 2008, five years after the close of "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer," four years after the end of "Angel," and the year before "Dollhouse," their creator Joss Whedon took it upon himself to make a short series for the Web, the three-act musical tragicomedy, "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. " Widely available these four years online and on home video, it finally comes to television Tuesday, as Whedon may have hoped all along - it is conveniently about the length of an hour of television, with the commercials taken out - on the CW, the network that undoubtedly would have been the home of "Buffy" and "Angel" had it existed when those shows were on, or those shows existed now. But let me return from that parallel universe.

At the end of the night, the El Monte lifeguards who were fired for making a video spoof of a South Korean pop phenomenon did not win their jobs back. But they did make a splash that continues to be felt in the San Gabriel Valley city. "The city is the laughingstock of the nation," observed political consultant Xavier Hermosillo during a lengthy council meeting Tuesday that ended with city officials ordering a review of the mass firing. He suggested the city "do the right thing" and hire back the guards.

It went viral, all right. But in all the wrong ways. Now 13 city lifeguards and their supervisor in El Monte are fighting to get their jobs back - after being fired for making a video spoof of a widely popular Korean pop star's song. The "Lifeguard Style" video - a takeoff on the YouTube sensation "Gangnam Style" by rapper Psy - rocketed across the Internet, watched by more than 1 million YouTube viewers. Yet the audience that counted most - city officials - took a dim view of it. "We thought it was hysterical and we wanted to try something fun," said Michael Roa, a University of La Verne student who worked at the El Monte Aquatic Center for seven years.

Any day now the announcement that "Jaws the Musical" is heading to Broadway will appear in my inbox, ringing the death knell for the commercially desperate American theater. But until that apocalyptic moment, let's savor the revue-style ingenuity of "Silence! The Musical," a singing sendup of that pulpy yet polished 1991 blockbuster "The Silence of the Lambs," winner of a disproportionate number of Academy Awards for a movie in which body parts are there for the filleting. A cult hit in New York, the show opened Saturday at the Hayworth Theatre in a production that preserves its New York International Fringe Festival roots.

The Oregon Duck is no quack. He did a parody of "Gangnam Style," a song that has gone absolutely viral, drawing more than 76 million views. (See the original video below.) The Duck's version is equally hilarious. It features the same awesome dance moves, which must have been really fun to do in an animal suit equipped with webbed feet. The Duck's version, which was posted Thursday, will surely inspire many other parodies. Just look at the Harvard baseball team's parody of "Call me Maybe," which already has nearly 16 million views and led to a slew of other colleges producing similar videos this summer.

Since the 1970s, the books of Judy Blume have prepared generations of girls for the emotional and biological hurdles on the way to womanhood: The sting of first love, those mysterious undergarments and the harsh reality that not even divine intervention can save you from puberty. In honor of Blume's legacy, the Cavern Club Theater in Silver Lake hosts "Are You There God? It's Me, Karen Carpenter," a musical parody that mashes up memorable moments from Blume's coming-of-age classic "Are You There God?

If you watch one YouTube video today, let it be this. "We're NASA  and We Know It" takes slices of the Mars Science Laboratory rover's dramatic Aug. 5 landing - ostensibly a great moment in modern planetary exploration - and blends them into a music video parody styled after the leopard-thonged LMFAO's music video "Sexy and I Know It. " The satire features NASA characters that the viewing public has grown to know and love. The actor singing the song plays the Mohawk Guy - real-life flight director Bobak Ferdowsi, who rose to Twitter stardom after his stars-and-stripes 'do captivated viewers at home.

When the Cookie Monster did his version of Carly Rae Jepson's "Call Me Maybe," I was ever so grateful to have something else on continuous play in my head -- even if, technically, it was the same song.  The catchy little song of the summer is still yielding version after version on YouTube. There are remakes, parodies and mashups, pulling single words or even just sounds to re-create the song. And everyone from average folk to Jimmy Fallon, Tom Brady and the president has done or been featured in a version of the song.

Jeremy Lin is no longer a member of the New York Knicks. James Dolan  is still the owner of the team. Those facts had plenty of Knicks fans pretty upset on Tuesday, when the organization failed to match the Houston Rockets' three-year offer worth about $25 million for the wildly popular restricted free agent. In addition to taking out their frustration in the usual way (on Twitter, naturally), a couple of fans are expressing themselves musically -- well, actually, in song parodies ... or in one person's case, song title parodies.

Cookie Monster is getting his moment in the white-hot center of the Internet Tuesday as his parody video, "Share It Maybe" -- a takeoff on Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" -- is making the rounds. Cookie Monster's music video (which will surely rival his previous hit, "C Is For Cookie") shares a connection with two previous viral sensations: the Muppets, who had a run of great music videos last year, including a cover of "Bohemian Rhapsody," and PBS, which released a trippy Mister Rogers video called "Garden of Your Mind" last month.