Is it so wrong to laugh with rather than laugh at, and doesn’t parody leave room for either?
Perhaps you’ll recognize the following quote taken from a popular meme of the mid-2010s: “Satire requires a clarity of purpose and target, lest it be mistaken for, and contribute to, that which it intends to criticize.” Succinct, well-punctuated, and styled—in classic meme fashion—in Impact font, the admonishment meets its viewer from the tank top of a man in a backwards snapback addressing us mid-finger wag, his expression betraying little of the “clarity of purpose” the accompanying text would solicit. Point taken, authoring user lost to the sands of time; “successful” satire does require a certain ill-definable measure of intention to land as critique. But what about those forms of parody, mockery, or sarcasm—of humor, in short, bracketed beneath the larger heading of something like mimicry—that are altogether uninterested in criticizing the subject of their joke? What of those perhaps so minor in their deployment that any potential critique is “mistaken for” or “contributes to” their object? I mean, really: is it so wrong to laugh with rather than laugh at, and doesn’t parody leave room for either?
This mimetic “poking fun” that doesn’t quite reach critique (if that were ever its goal) quietly operates in the background of an unlikely text: Nickelodeon’s iCarly (2007–2012). The technology that surfaces in the interstices of iCarly’s narrative action – consumer electronics like (smart)phones, computers, tablets, and mp3 players – quietly make “realistic” a show about being an adolescent in the shadow of the emergent digital culture of the late aughts. iCarly parodies (if without fangs) the technologies that overtook the goings-on of American youth during its five-year run, down to its series-spanning spoof of the real-world Apple Company with its in-show “Pear Company.” The Pear Company’s “PearPhones,” “PearBooks,” “PearPads,” and “PearPods” routinely appear in and out of focus throughout the series, appearing as early as iCarly’s pilot. Most of the time, they merely replicate a given Apple device—the only difference being a conspicuous bitten-pear logo in the place of Apple’s iconic bitten apple.
Other times, however, the design principles of Pear Company devices skew ridiculous or even mannerist vis-à-vis the Apple products for which they stand. Where the PearPad and -Phone come to take on the shape of literal pears by their second and third generation, the “PearPad 1” (which debuts in iCarly shortly after the release of the first Apple iPad) is strikingly similar to the iPad—rectangular, sleek, with rounded edges—but five times as big.
The name I give to iCarly’s depiction of real-world technologies through these near-analogs is pearody. The devices laugh with rather than at Apple products, treating them as a part of everyday life rather than objects of ridicule. In betraying no “clarity of purpose” with respect to the critical edge we associate with parody, the Pear Company electronics in iCarly and later Nickelodeon shows seemingly want to “be mistaken for” or “contribute to” their target. The pearody of iCarly is defanged: the Pear devices may outrageously represent an identifiable referent, but their on-screen appearance feels no less natural as a result. If anything, its pearody of real-world consumer electronics makes the show’s portrayal of US youth culture of the late-2000s and early-2010s more real/istic, more in line with the increasingly technologically interpenetrated world of the first generation of “digital natives” (b. 1992–). iCarly produces what Roland Barthes might consider a “reality effect” through its regular inclusion of almost-true-to-the-moment technological touchstones that are “neither incongruous nor significant” relative to the post-digital external reality they index on screen.
All this to say, the show’s use of pearody illustrates a certain documentary function of uncritical parody, if only in the limited context of children’s media. By spoofing the popular consumer electronics of its day, Nickelodeon successfully evades regulations regarding the feature of name-brand products in children’s programming. But more importantly, the show bottles for future viewers something affectively true to the experience of being an adolescent at the dawn of the smartphone and social media, albeit through the distortions that inevitably come with using made-for-TV vaporware as a surrogate for real-world technologies.
iCarly follows three teenagers, the eponymous Carly (Miranda Cosgrove), the crass but endearing Sam (Jeanette McCurdy), and Freddie (Nathan Kress), the program’s focal “tech guy,” as they produce a popular weekly webshow also called iCarly. The webshow’s origins owe to the trio’s decision to upload footage of their middle school’s talent show auditions to a video-streaming platform, “SplashFace,” which functions in much the same way as YouTube and whose name invokes Facebook. To their horror, they realize they have mistakenly posted a video in which Carly and Sam mock their teacher. Fearful of the consequences, the three go to remove the video but find that it has already gone viral, with users in the comments urging them to make more content.
Taken with the positive reception of their SplashFace upload, the three start their own webshow, capitalizing on the attention they receive as the producers of an inadvertently viral video. iCarly is thus the first show about digital content-creation as such, arriving prior to the introduction of “content-creation” into our cultural lexicon. iCarly’s narrative, propelled by the characters’ work to generate ideas for and host the webshow, captures and reflects back to viewers the constitutive activities (digital content-creation and -consumption), defining online containers (social media platforms), and emergent economies (of attention, views, and clicks) we now consider endemic to the “Web 2.0 turn” (ca. 2006–). The show simply wouldn’t make sense or have any appeal to a US audience sans the external, real-world context that is Web 2.0: a period in internet history marked by the sudden proliferation of networked devices and the arrival of user-driven, easy-to-use, collaborative web platforms such as Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), Twitter (2006), or Instagram (2010).
iCarly belongs to the catalog of smash-hit series developed for Nickelodeon by Dan Schneider and his production company “Schneider’s Bakery” throughout the mid-2000s and 2010s. Titles like Drake & Josh (2004–2007), Zoey 101 (2005–2008), Victorious (2010–2013), and Sam & Cat (2013–2014), in addition to iCarly, feature overlapping cast members or are narratively linked via crossover specials. Repeated gestures to the stars of the day seemingly anchor the shows within the same spacetime as our own, as with Oprah Winfrey (who is repeatedly invoked in Drake & Josh), singer-songwriter Kesha (who appears in Victorious), or Jimmy Fallon (whose cameo in iCarly features Jimmy’s own live broadcast).
Schneider’s Bakery shows would become emblematic of their era, in large part because they debuted during—and kept pace with—a cultural moment in which being a kid began to assume a radically different shape. I received my first “emergency-only” cell phone in 2005, just as Zoey 101 star Jamie Lynn Spears did on screen. A year prior, I became so enamored with the “Gamesphere” featured in the Drake & Josh season-two opener “The Bet” that I begged my mom for its real-world counterpart, the Nintendo GameCube. What I’m getting at is this: this universe of shows responded to an unfolding period in American culture, one indelibly marked by an influx of networked devices aimed at the would-be first generation of digital natives. But the shows in question did so not by naming technologies of the day, but rather by populating their on-screen lifeworlds with near-equivalents and imaginary knock-offs, ultimately coming to rely on those Pear Company products first introduced in iCarly. It is the Pear Company that sutures together the latter half of Schneider’s shows, above and beyond their shared tone or crossovers.
Down to its name, iCarly is a time capsule of Web 2.0’s blossoming in ways that far exceed what Zoey 101 or Drake & Josh may have anticipated. It premiered in 2007, mere months after the debut of the first Apple iPhone and partway through a year that marked the greatest percentage increase in internet-penetration rate among American consumers since 2001. By the first season’s 18th episode, Carly herself pulls from her pocket a smartphone curiously, remarkably similar to the iPhone but which proudly displays a bitten-pear symbol on its back cover. Until this point in the series, Carly uses what is recognizably a Motorola Razr Z3—the object of envy among American teens between 2004 and 2007—but which has no logo at all. Where the Motorola M would ordinarily sit on the distinctively flat and angular clamshell phone, viewers find no insignia. To this point, Carly’s Not-Razr serves primarily to code her as a teen girl—it is at once “a cellphone” while also, for those in the know, the cellphone of the era. She texts a boy on it, giggling; she calls Sam to report bad news; she uses it in emergency situations. Though her acquisition of this PearPhone may be unannounced within the show, it arrives to fulfill her diegetic need to respond on-the-go to an email from a company soliciting a product-placement deal with the webshow. The comparably mobile internet-ready affordances of the iPhone, as conveyed through the eerily similar PearPhone, justifies the in-narrative replacement of her Not-Razr.
iCarly’s efforts to depict a functionally realistic picture of the Web 2.0 turn are circumscribed by a few key considerations. Namely, technologies are proprietary and copyright protections exist. The show can’t let slip that Carly’s aforementioned Motorola Razr is that particular phone, lest Nickelodeon be compelled to pay Motorola for its inclusion. But any potential copyright complications aside, iCarly is a show made for children produced by a children’s media network, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)—the body governing the content of US television stations—has strict guidelines for what may or may not be featured in children’s programming. One such restriction is what the FCC calls “host-selling,” the in-show feature of “any character endorsement that has the effect of confusing a child viewer from distinguishing between program and non-program material.” Although it would certainly be plausible for a girl of Carly’s age and status to own a Motorola Razr during the time of iCarly’s first season, the show must take steps to disguise the phone in question for fear of the FCC pronouncing any episode in which it identifiably appears a “program-length commercial.” Were Carly to use a “real” Razor, any episode in which it appears could be considered an advertisement for that particular phone.
The tightrope that iCarly treads is this: the series aims to portray the goings-on of a youth culture that has, as if overnight, become palpably bound up with the everyday use of networked devices and web platforms, but that portrayal can’t involve the very devices or platforms that viewers would recognize as quote-unquote faithfully constitutive of their reality. So, what’s a show literally about digital culture to do? It turns to the Pear Company—to pearody—to side-step the pitfalls of product placement, putting PearPhones and PearBooks where we might expect to find iPhones or MacBooks, whether to illustrate the increasing degree to which adolescents between 2007–2012 came to use internet-equipped devices or as part and parcel of depicting Carly, Sam, and Freddie in the process of making their webshow (and often both).
But if, for the FCC, any real product held in regard by a character in a children’s program constitutes an advertisement for that product, it is tempting to think of the Pear Company products featured in iCarly, Victorious, and Sam & Cat as functional advertisements for altogether unreal consumer goods. Seen as would-be advertisements for things not on the market but which appear equivalent in form and function to existing consumer electronics, the Pear Company products strangely resemble a kind of vaporware, a form of software or hardware advertised by a tech company that doesn’t yet exist (and often never does). Offering up vaporware—whether in the form of mockups, product descriptions, designs, or ways in which a company merely hopes to apply an emerging technology—is something of a common advertising tactic for tech companies hoping to drum up consumer interest or source venture capital. Vaporware is, in other words, a hype engine: a means of selling an idea about a technology that isn’t quite (but might one day be) on the market by emphasizing its novelty or coolness relative to existing products.
In the constant back and forth between the real-world Apple and the Schneiderverse’s Pear Company, there emerges a playful commentary on Apple’s planned obsolescence-driven, hype-powered business model that borders on the critiques we might expect from Apple’s actual competitors. When Freddie spends an episode working at the Pear Store in iCarly’s fifth season (“iWork for Pear,” S5E5), for example, he finds that his sincere passion for device specs impedes his ability to sell Pear products to consumers who, as one shopper repeats on end, only care if a given model “comes in blue.” And in one episode of Victorious, a Schneider’s Bakery show that notably employs close-ups of status updates on PearPhone screens to mark scene transitions, we see a tweet-styled update by Tori Vega (Victoria Justice) stating that she opted to buy “another Pearphone GX” because she couldn’t be sure when the all-new PearPhone XT would come out, only for her to find upon returning to school that a classmate has, in fact, just purchased an XT.
In his foundational “The Aesthetics of Parody,” G.D. Kiremidjian offers that “parody itself has nothing fundamental to say, but consists in a petty critique of the original work, exposing in a small-souled way the minor flaws in the composition of the exalted model.” To be clear, the philosopher is thinking here about a particularly grand, literary form of parody—of works that remark in a more or less obviously critical way on a recognizable base text at the level of formal composition. Following Kiremidjian, it is inviting to think that what iCarly and its extended universe achieve through their Pear Company vaporware is an even “pett[ier] critique” of the “minor flaws” of, in this case, an extra-literary “exalted model” or “original work”: the Web 2.0 moment to which the shows respond, a media context external to the televisual but one which TV can’t rightly ignore.
If Nickelodeon’s pearody comes with any kernel of “critique” of the digital, it is one shaped by and filtered through a fidelity to realism set in the here and how, the tastes of an increasingly digitally minded audience, and the restrictions placed on Nickelodeon with regard to children’s media. For iCarly to keep up with the rhythms of a youth culture amid its own transformation, its representation of that reality through knock-off, spoofed, vaporware-equivalents of the moment’s defining consumer electronics ends up looking a lot like parody—but a parody whose only real bite is one taken from a pear-shaped logo.
Sam McCracken is a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan whose research centers on the aesthetics and environmental politics of digital trash. He once met the Englishman for whom Where’s Waldo was written at a bar in São Paulo, Brazil; that is to say, he literally found Waldo.