The Onion’s Supreme Court Amicus Brief Defending Parody

Speaking of entertaining legal documents that address serious issues, I’ve been meaning to link to the amicus brief filed by The Onion on behalf of Anthony Novak, who is suing the police department of Parma, Ohio in a case now before the Supreme Court. Long story short, Novak created a parody Facebook account for the police department; the police arrested him and he spent four days in jail, simply for having mocked them; and when Novak subsquently attempted to sue the police department for civil damages, the Sixth Circuit court of appeals held that the police could not be held responsible under the bullshit doctrine of “qualified immunity”.

The Onion’s brief begins itself as parody:

The Onion is the world’s leading news publication, offering highly acclaimed, universally revered coverage of breaking national, international, and local news events. Rising from its humble beginnings as a print newspaper in 1756, The Onion now enjoys a daily readership of 4.3 trillion and has grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human history.

In addition to maintaining a towering standard of excellence to which the rest of the industry aspires, The Onion supports more than 350,000 full- and part-time journalism jobs in its numerous news bureaus and manual labor camps stationed around the world, and members of its editorial board have served with distinction in an advisory capacity for such nations as China, Syria, Somalia, and the former Soviet Union. On top of its journalistic pursuits, The Onion also owns and operates the majority of the world’s transoceanic shipping lanes, stands on the nation’s leading edge on matters of deforestation and strip mining, and proudly conducts tests on millions of animals daily.

But while the brief contains many jokes, it is no joke itself and forcefully makes the point that parody is protected speech because it can be so effective:

Time and again, that’s what has occurred with The Onion’s news stories. In 2012, for example, The Onion proclaimed that Kim Jong-un was the sexiest man alive. China’s state-run news agency republished The Onion’s story as true alongside a slideshow of the dictator himself in all his glory. The Fars Iranian News Agency uncritically picked up and ran with The Onion’s headline “Gallup Poll: Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad To Obama.” Domestically, the number of elected leaders who are still incapable of parsing The Onion’s coverage as satire is daunting, but one particular example stands out: Republican Congressman John Fleming, who believed that he needed to warn his constituents of a dangerous escalation of the pro-choice movement after reading The Onion’s headline “Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex.”

The point of all this is not that it is funny when deluded figures of authority mistake satire for the actual news — even though that can be extremely funny. Rather, it’s that the parody allows these figures to puncture their own sense of self-importance by falling for what any reasonable person would recognize as an absurd escalation of their own views. In the political context, the effect can be particularly pronounced. See Hustler Mag., Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46, 53–55 (1988); see also Falwell v. Flynt, 805 F.2d 484, 487 (4th Cir. 1986) (Wilkinson, J., dissenting from denial of rehearing) (“Nothing is more thoroughly democratic than to have the high-and-mighty lampooned and spoofed.”).

★ Friday, 2 December 2022