Parody is an art.
The Guardian One of the April fool spoofs published in the newspapers this year suggested that in future, because of a quirk of European law, impressionists would have to pay royalties to those whose faces and voices they imitated. Only a crazed Europhobic could have been taken in for very long by this because the idea seemed so ridiculous. And yet now a literary version of this principle is being presented in all seriousness as a legal argument in an American court. Lawyers for the estate of Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone With The Wind, are seeking to prevent the publication of The Wind Done Gone, a novel by Alice Randall due to be published in June. Randall's book is a parody of the American civil war classic, which, through mockery of the plot and characters, tries to highlight what Randall believes to be the racist undertones of the original.