It has been argued that the maqāma genre parodies ḥadīth transmission by using a fictional isnād. Scholars generally assume that this parodic feature and the generally playful tone of the maqāma underwrite a subversive project which is then justified or disguised through pedagogical apology. In making this claim, some have drawn on the work of the Russian formalist critic Mikhail Bakhtin and his notion of the carnivalesque. This essay challenges the reliance on formal criteria to determine the relationship between a text and its cultural context which allows critics to claim subversive intentions in parodic texts. Indeed, parody can also be used to reinforce normativity by parodying outsiders or the underclass. When the Ḥanbalī moralist Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1200) tells a parodic story about ḥadīth transmission with subversive potential, no modern scholar would suggest that the text is intended to be subversive. Instead, it is understood to ridicule those who transmit ḥadīth improperly. Thus, the indeterminacy of the parody's connotations is often solved by resorting to biography or by assuming that the audience must have specific attitudes about the acceptability of being playful with religion. However, parody's indeterminacy points to the limits of formalism for identifying the signification of a text within medieval Arabic discourse. To explore alternative approaches to parody and subversiveness, I examine three parodic treatments of ḥadīth from the 5th/11th to the 6th/12th centuries by Ibn Nāqiyā (d. 485/1092), al-Ḥarīrī (d. 516/1122), and Ibn al-Jawzī. In all three examples, a character in the story takes a tendentious approach to the isnād or to ḥadīth interpretation in order to justify illicit behavior from lying to grave robbing. In all three cases, the playfulness of the story is susceptible to a subversive interpretation on formal grounds. These subversive interpretations need not be dismissed, but they should not be assumed. I use the tools of social history and resources of medieval Arabic literary theory and commentary to offer a new reading of the attitudes toward the parodying of ḥadīth and its transmission in this period.