When a genre pretends to be another genre within a genre pretending to be another genre . . .

I promised a break from my blog posts for a few weeks, but I had to share this gem of genre fun. (My thanks to Sune Auken, who found it and gave it to me.)

The photo above is of a single sheet of paper. One side is blank. One the other side, you see a replica newspaper. It has headlines Extra! Extra! It has photos. It has a weather report--full moon tonight. And it has classifieds. Newspaper genres within a newspaper. 

If you look more closely, though, you see that the text is all the ​Lene quatem name prepenum . . .

You know. Like in the placeholder text for templates. So there we have the placeholder genre stuck inside the newspaper genre.

But wait, there's more.

The Latin filler text is a clue. This isn't a newspaper at all. It's a fish wrapper. A piece of paper that fish mongers wrap fresh fish in when they sell it to you.

You know. Like they used to use newspaper for?

Since we no longer wrap fresh fish in (potentially dirty) newspaper, these clever folks in Denmark have printed fish wrap paper with the likeness of a newspaper, and then they filled the newspaper with template place-saver language. One genre within another genre pretending to be another genre but actually being another genre.

I say actually because this is clearly fish wrap. It may look like something else, but its function, what it does is certain. It wraps fresh fish. It does it in a clever and funny way. But it's still fish wrap. This might be a good example of why I don't want to say that genres equal their forms. Even though lots of genres are signaled by what they look like, with headlines and photos and ads looking like a newspaper, in the end it's what they do that counts.

but oh what fun to play with a genre pretending to be a genre (template language pretending to be real newspaper text) within a genre pretending to be a genre (fish wrap pretending to be a newspaper).

And the fish was delicious!