Task 4: (Cheeky): Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer was originally performed in 1979, and remains a high (or low) water mark for holiday songs.. Do you love irreverent holiday songs or hate them? What about holiday parodies? Link us to your favorite YouTube music video of either a parody or a holiday song that is not to be taken seriously and, if you’re up to it, give us a title or few verses of your own parody. To get you started, here is a holiday parody of Miley Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball called Deck the Halls by Dave & Brian.
Irreverence is fine (and funny), outright disrespectfulness is not.
Sometimes the two are hard to distinguish: one of Germany’s largest broadcast stations, which also happens to be the major one in my state, towards the end of 2019 published a recording of their (very popular) youth choir performing a parody of a popular German children’s song which in its actual lyrics praises “Oma” (grandma) for being a remarkable lady — but twisted in the parody so as to make Oma (literally) an environmental pig. Before they’d even blinked twice, they had Omagate on their hands (the link in the word goes to an English-language news feature that will give you the full story) … and the station’s CEO himself ended up apologizing to those whose sensibilities had been offended. Which, in turn, a year ago prompted one of Germany’s top TV satirists to record, with the same choir, a follow-up, this time blasting the COVID deniers in even more strident tones than the original parody had blasted the environmentally blind … (I’m not going to post it on the SRR; you can find the recording on YouTube HERE and the lyrics (in German) HERE).