Pegasus parody statistics
Someone recently told me that the Pegasus (the award voted on by the filk community and presented each year at the Ohio Valley Filk Fest) has rarely if ever been awarded to a parody. I just looked through the list, and it's true, as far as I can tell. The only clear exception is "Falling Down on New Jersey". The full list, as far as I can tell from skimming through the titles, is:
* As far as I my own work goes, it occurs me there's at least one other effect, besides the parody effect, that may help explain why none of my songs have ever won, or even been nominated for a category other than Parody, and that none of the last nine ballots have included any of my songs. Songwriters who write fewer songs may have less of a chance than those wrote write more, because to the extent that most of a given songwriter's songs tend to appeal to the tastes of the same people, each songwriter's songs will be competing with each other for nominations. Therefore, the one with fewer songs will tend to get more nominations. One of the most prolific filksong writers I can think of is Cynthia McQuillin, whose output I might catch up to if I live to be 100. I just checked, and sure enough, not a single one of Cindy's songs ever won a Pegasus in her lifetime, although she did posthumously receive a Best Tragedy award, and three of her other songs did get nominated in the 1990's, several times. One the other hand, the incredibly prolific Seanan McGuire is fairly prolific as a songwriter, and three of her songs won.
- In the three years when there was a Best Parody category, a parody did manage to beat out the ever-popular Noah Ward, assuming he was even on that ballot those years. Best Parody was originally a category for the first two years an OVFF was held, and returned as the floating category for 2004. Those winners were "Twelve Years at Worldcon by Frank Hayes", "Daddy's Little Boy by Murray Porath", and "Knight's In White Satin" by Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff.
- "Falling Down on New Jersey", by Mitchell Burnside Clapp won in 2007 - and even that was belated, by definition, since it was awarded in the Best Classic Filk Song category. It was nominated for Best End of the World Song in 2000 and lost to "Out of a Clear Blue Sky". Admittedly, the reason it lost in 2000 might not have been that it was a parody, but that voters figured that if New Jersey were wiped off the face of the Earth, it wouldn't be the end of the world.
- Some might count "Like A Lamb to the Slaughter" by Frank Hayes, which won in 1994. I wouldn't count that as a parody. I say that not because it beat "Kinsey Scale" (the second and most recent one of my songs to be nominated and appear on the ballot), but because I wouldn't technically count it as a parody of talking blues since talking blues is not a song but "a form of a form of folk music and country music characterized by rhythmic speech or near-speech where the melody is free, but the rhythm is strict." (Wikipedia, which does not capitalize it like a title.) On the other hand, it retells a song, "Matty Groves" using the talking-blues structure, the same way that songs we now tend to call "mash-ups" parody one song (i.e., use its tune and the structure of its lyrics) to retell another.
- And logically, given that I was given the Best Writer/Composer award in 2000, we can conclude from the fact that I won in 2000 that the filk community considers parodies to be Pegasus-worthy. That's the only reasonable conclusion, given than I only write parodies, and everyone knows it - even if you don't count the serious ones that I still call parodies and most other people don't; there were less than a dozen of those in 2000 and I doubt anyone voted for me based on those. So Pegasus voters must like parodies; they just have trouble thinking of any particular one they like well enough to vote for in large enough numbers. It's conceivable there's a vote-splitting effect.*
- I'm far from the only parodist to have won a Pegasus for Best Writer/Composer. There's Tom Smith, Tom Smith, Zander Nyron, Tom Smith, Tom Smith, and Tom Smith. (I'm kidding: Tom has only won Best Composer three times, partly because Rule IV.C.ii specifically prevents him from winning much more often.) But there's no reason to think anyone had any of Zander's or Tom's parodies in mind when they voted, since each has written many other songs, whether humorous or serious, which in some cases won their own awards
* As far as I my own work goes, it occurs me there's at least one other effect, besides the parody effect, that may help explain why none of my songs have ever won, or even been nominated for a category other than Parody, and that none of the last nine ballots have included any of my songs. Songwriters who write fewer songs may have less of a chance than those wrote write more, because to the extent that most of a given songwriter's songs tend to appeal to the tastes of the same people, each songwriter's songs will be competing with each other for nominations. Therefore, the one with fewer songs will tend to get more nominations. One of the most prolific filksong writers I can think of is Cynthia McQuillin, whose output I might catch up to if I live to be 100. I just checked, and sure enough, not a single one of Cindy's songs ever won a Pegasus in her lifetime, although she did posthumously receive a Best Tragedy award, and three of her other songs did get nominated in the 1990's, several times. One the other hand, the incredibly prolific Seanan McGuire is fairly prolific as a songwriter, and three of her songs won.