By pushing the frontiers of image and sound outward for no other purpose than to gain an audience, the biggest firms defoliate the field for less powerful producers, forcing them either to adopt the production values of the big boys or aim for a smaller audience that is reacting against the aesthetics of the marketplace. The implications in the visual realm are interesting to contemplate. The consumption of consumers themselves is too troubling a prospect for the consciousness industry to face. So strained are the various attempts to prop up the spectacle that they create a second industry out of parody. Thus the live comedy boom throughout the 1980s and the rise of David Letterman as a resident wise guy in the entertainment household.
Parody is a kind of negative empowerment of the audience.
It empowers because it gives back to things their right names. The ridiculously inflated is presented as ridiculously inflated. The laughs that result are the sound of the audience rediscovering its collective wits in the shared recognition of how stupid the thing being parodied really is. But the joke may still be on us. When the balloon has been popped and the conceit exposed, the functions of parody are over.