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Mr. Onion goes to Washington

Defending satire after the death of irony

Satirical news site The Onion filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in the case of an Ohio man arrested in 2016 for creating a Facebook page parodying Parma, Ohio’s police department’s page. It’s slogan?  “We no crime.” 

Police charged Anthony Novak with a felony. A public interest law firm explains:

The Parma Police Department did not appreciate Anthony’s criticism. Citing 11 calls that Parma residents made to a nonemergency line to either ask about or tattle on Anthony’s parody page, police obtained a warrant for his arrest, searched his apartment, seized his electronics, and charged him with a felony under an Ohio law that criminalizes using a computer to “disrupt” “police operations.” Anthony had to spend four days in jail before making bail. He was prosecuted, but after a full criminal trial, a jury found him not guilty.

But when Anthony tried to vindicate his rights by filing a civil-rights lawsuit, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to hold the police officers accountable for their actions. Despite the clear violation of Anthony’s First and Fourth Amendment rights, the Sixth Circuit granted the officers qualified immunity—a doctrine that the Supreme Court invented in the 1980s to protect government officials from being sued for unconstitutional conduct. As a result, Anthony’s case was thrown out.

“There’s no recognized right to be free from a retaliatory arrest that is supported by probable cause,” the appellate court ruled. Novak has petitioned SCOTUS to take up his case and to .

The Onion, “the world’s leading news publication” boasting a “daily readership of 4.3 trillion,”  took up his cause. The Sixth Circuit’s ruling threatens the business model of an operation supporting “more than 350,000 full- and parttime journalism jobs,” they again boast, but with serious intent:

The Onion regularly pokes its finger in the eyes of repressive and authoritarian regimes, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea, and domestic presidential administrations. So The Onion’s professional parodists were less than enthralled to be confronted with a legal ruling that fails to hold government actors accountable for jailing and prosecuting a would-be humorist simply for making fun of them.

“Novak’s petition calls on the Supreme Court to decide whether officials can claim qualified immunity when they arrest someone based purely on speech,” reports the Washington Post. “It also asks the justices to do away with the doctrine altogether.”

The Onion drove home its point as The Onion would:

I. Parody Functions By Tricking People Into Thinking That It Is Real.

Tu stultus es. You are dumb. These three Latin words have been The Onion’s motto and guiding light since it was founded in 1988 as America’s Finest News Source, leading its writers toward the paper’s singular purpose of pointing out that its readers are deeply gullible people. The Onion’s motto is central to this brief for two important reasons. First, it’s Latin. And The Onion knows that the federal judiciary is staffed entirely by total Latin dorks: They quote Catullus in the original Latin in chambers. They sweetly whisper “stare decisis” into their spouses’ ears. They mutter “cui bono” under their breath while picking up after their neighbors’ dogs. So The Onion knew that, unless it pointed to a suitably Latin rallying cry, its brief would be operating far outside the Court’s vernacular.

Attorneys procede to give SCOTUS a parody lesson complete with examples and supporting case citations of how parody has functioned in history.

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.7 China’s state-run news agency republished The Onion’s story as true alongside a slideshow of the dictator himself in all his glory.8 The Fars Iranian News Agency uncritically picked up and ran with The Onions headline “Gallup Poll: Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad To Obama.”9 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.”10

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.”).

There are serious First Amendment issues at stake. Not that The Onion would treat them “with a straight face.”

IV. It Should Be Obvious That Parodists Cannot Be Prosecuted For Telling A Joke With A Straight Face.

This is the fifteenth page of a convoluted legal filing intended to deconstruct the societal implications of parody, so the reader’s attention is almost certainly wandering. That’s understandable. So here is a paragraph of gripping legal analysis to ensure that every jurist who reads this brief is appropriately impressed by the logic of its argument and the lucidity of its prose: Bona vacantia. De bonis asportatis. Writ of certiorari. De minimis. Jus accrescendi. Forum non conveniens. Corpus juris. Ad hominem tu quoque. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. Quod est demonstrandum. Actus reus. Scandalum magnatum. Pactum reservati dominii.

See what happened? This brief itself went from a discussion of parody’s function—and the quite serious historical and legal arguments in favor of strong protections for parodic speech—to a curveball mocking the way legalese can be both impenetrably boring and belie the hollowness of a legal position. That’s the setup and punchline idea again. It would not have worked quite as well if this brief had said the following: “Hello there, reader, we are about to write an amicus brief about the value of parody. Buckle up, because we’re going to be doing some fairly outré things, including commenting on this text’s form itself!”

In over 30 years, have none of these judges watched The Simpsons?

The New Age movement was in full flower when I arrived in “Paris of the South,” the “New Age Mecca” before it became the “Cesspool of Sin.” Every other person I met was an “internationally recognized” seeker — seeking ways to monetize their spiritual journey and ready to believe anything. Flyers for weekend workshops in neuro-nuclear transmigration or whatnot were in every health food store. I began posting parodies and found, as The Onion has, it was hard to keep ahead of reality (or unreality). I imagined a men’s support group called “Men Without Foreskins,” only to have a relation in Montana, a psychologist, say he knew of a similar group there.

No matter how crazy the fake product or therapy, believers did me one better. Now, Trumpublicans in Pennsylvania want to elect one of these guys to the U.S. Senate.

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