Life & Wisdom Quote by Bruce McCall

Parody is McCall's quiet vote of confidence in culture and his sly warning about it. "You can parody almost anything" reads like a permissive shrug, but it smuggles in a tougher claim: our world is so saturated with recognizable styles, poses, and brand-side sincerity that nearly any object can be made to reveal its seams. Parody works because it relies on shared fluency. If the audience can't instantly clock the original's rhythms, the joke collapses. So the line is really about consensus: what we collectively know well enough to mock.

McCall, whose work often treats mid-century American optimism and design language as ripe comic material, understands parody as a stress test. It doesn't just puncture pretension; it measures how standardized our tastes have become. When something is parodiable, it's legible, predictable, built from templates. The "almost" does the important ethical work. It concedes there are zones where parody turns lazy or cruel: private grief, vulnerable identities, catastrophe fresh enough to still be bleeding. "Almost anything" frames taste not as a fixed rulebook but as timing, angle, and target. Punching up can illuminate. Punching down is just bullying with a laugh track.

In a media ecosystem where brands borrow the tone of self-awareness and politics borrows the tone of entertainment, parody also becomes defensive. If everything is already winking, satire has to get sharper to draw blood. McCall's line lands as both a creative dare and a diagnosis: the more performative reality gets, the more parody feels like basic literacy.