: Where's the balance between realism and story? Mark mentioned in his answer that plotholes aren't usually the end of the world, and that I shouldn't sacrifice too much of the story and the

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Your question starts out asking about plot holes but then you appear to shift to asking about humor and parody. Those are not at all the same thing. I suppose you could describe both as "the story doesn't make sense". But a plot hole is when the author has failed to think through events in the story and there are logical flaws or inconsistencies. Like where a reader might ask, "But how could the villain have planned for the train wreck to enable him to escape when the hero was chasing him? How could he have not only known that the train would run off the tracks, but timed the chase so precisely that he and the hero were on opposite sides of the train at the instant it wrecked?" That is not at all the same as, say, a story portraying Tarzan constantly running into trees when he swings on a vine or Sherlock Holmes as an incompetent blunderer while Watson is the true brains behind the operation.

So how far can you go with humor and parody in a serious story? You can go a lot farther with some types of humor than others.

You can have a very serious story where the hero regularly tosses out funny lines. Lots of stories have heroes who make witty comments as they beat up the villain, etc. That doesn't bend reality much because real people do indeed tell jokes and make funny comments in real life. It can be pushing it if the hero goes overboard on making funny comments while he's in a desperate situation. Would someone fighting for his life really spare the energy to make up jokes? But it's not impossible.

Slapstick humor is much more limiting. Yes, a serious hero could accidentally walk into a closet and come out with a mop on his head looking like a bad wig. But that would be hard to pull off without really breaking the mood of a serious spy thriller.

Cartoon-type action is probably the extreme. I would have a very hard time believing a movie that presents itself as a serious war movie, where the enemy fire a rifle grenade at the hero and literally blow his head off ... and then another heads pops up from his collar. I'd just be saying, No.

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If I understand your question correctly, you're asking to which extent the Rule of Cool trope would let you get away with things in a relatively realistic story.

The answer to that is, distinct story elements have to match the overall tone of the story. Otherwise, they stick out like a sore thumb. If an element "doesn't fit", then you can't insert it. No matter how much you might want to.

You do get some leeway. For example, a story element might be hinged on contrived coincidence. It could happen, it's just unlikely. Consider, for instance, Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables: in all of Paris, Marius just happened to rent a room next to the Thénardiers, with Marius's father believing his life had been saved by Monsieur Thénardier. And Marius is in love with Cosette, who had been a ward of the Thénardiers. Not very likely, is it? But the story can hardly be considered unrealistic. In fact, it's power is derived from the fact that readers felt this could happen, this was happening all around them.

You also get away with inherent illogic of core story elements, without which there is no story in the first place. For example, Tolkien's legendariun is not a pastiche or a travesty, it's not a humorous work, it doesn't suffer from lapses in logic. But it contains dragons, and immortal elves. Tolkien doesn't have to answer how dragons breath fire, how they fly, how comes elves don't get old - those are axioms, on which everything else is built.

A simple rule of thumb: if something feels to you like it doesn't make any sense, don't write it. If you can't make yourself believe in a story element, there's definitely something wrong there. If something makes sense to you, but not to your beta readers, address it - either provide the story framework for the element to make sense (as @Mark Baker points out: mention tornadoes, so the appearance of one isn't "out of the blue"), or change the story element. If it took for your work to get printed before someone spotted an inconsistency - you got away with it, but try to do better next time.

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The technical name for what you're describing is a "travesty." Often mistaken for parody, the travesty is a thinly disguised version of someone else's work, used as a setting for cheap gags. The difference between a parody and a travesty is that a parody is capable of standing on its own, even if you don't know the source material, whereas a travesty draws 100% of its strengths from its source or sources. It doesn't have any internal coherence or logic of its own. Travesties can be very popular, but no one would ever consider them great art. This is not what @Mark Baker is talking about.

The core idea is that stories are not reality, and we don't expect them to be. We do expect that settings will have their own internal logic and coherence, but readers will overlook minor flaws in that department if the story is strong enough, and if it makes emotional sense. We do also expect that the author will not unnecessarily endanger our suspension of disbelief.

For these reasons, cheap gags don't generally belong in a story that you want to be taken seriously. You're probably better off trying to mine the intrinsic humor that is often present under the surface in serious situations. It IS possible to take a concept that sounds trivial on the surface, and endow it with real weight and meaning, but it's not easy. The comic strip 1/0 started out as a cheap travesty on webcomics, and ended up as a substantive meditation on life, love, religion and the nature of existence, but that's definitely the exception to the rule. Murakami and Pratchett have also had success in bringing real weight and heft to concepts that seem impossible to take seriously --but they're idiosyncratic geniuses. If you're working at that level, more power to you.

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