A parody, in current use, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on or trivialize an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of satiric or ironic imitation. As the literary theorist Linda Hutcheon puts it, "parody … is imitation, not always at the expense of the parodied text." Another critic, Simon Dentith, defines parody as "any cultural practice which provides a relatively polemical allusive imitation of another cultural production or practice." Parody may be found in art or culture, including literature, music (although "parody" in music has an earlier, somewhat different meaning than for other art forms), animation, gaming and film.

The writer and critic John Gross observes in his Oxford Book of Parodies, that parody seems to flourish on territory somewhere between pastiche ("a composition in another artist's manner, without satirical intent") and burlesque (which "fools around with the material of high literature and adapts it to low ends"). Historically, when a formula grows tired, like in the case of moralistic melodramas in the 1910s, it retains value only as a parody, as in the case of Buster Keaton shorts that mocked it.

In his 1960 anthology of parody from the 14th through 20th centuries, critic Dwight Macdonald offered the general definition "Parody is making a new wine that tastes like the old but has a slightly lethal effect."