Tanisha Rana
Published on: October 6, 2022 at 22:44 IST
Thanks to the diligent efforts of America’s best source for made-up news, the call for justice is once again resonating throughout the country.
The Onion, a historic satirical journal, has requested that the US Supreme Court take up a matter involving the right to parody in a very serious legal filing. And the filing does what the Onion does best, serving up a heaping helping of complete nonsense, in order to make a serious legal point.
According to the filing, The Onion has 4.3 trillion readers worldwide and is “the single most powerful and influential organisation in human history.”
In addition to “owning and operating the majority of the world’s transoceanic shipping lanes, standing on the nation’s cutting edge in matters of deforestation and strip mining, and proudly conducting tests on millions of animals daily,” it is the source of 350,000 jobs at its offices and “manual labour camps.”
With such power, why does the Onion feel the need to weigh in on a mundane court case?
“To protect its continued ability to create fiction that may ultimately merge into reality,” the filing asserts. “The Onion’s writers also have a self-serving interest in preventing political authorities from imprisoning humourists. This brief is submitted in the interest of at least mitigating their future punishment.”
The outlet is concerned about the outcome of a case it describes in a headline: “Ohio Police Officers Arrest, Prosecute Man Who Made Fun of Them on Facebook”. It sounds like an Onion headline, the filing points out, but it’s not.
Anthony Novak was detained in 2016 for creating a parody Facebook page of the Parma, Ohio, police page. He was accused of interfering with a public service, but he was found not guilty.
He filed a lawsuit against the department the following year, claiming it was acting against him for exercising his right to free speech, according to Cleveland.com.
A US appeals court sided with the police in the case in May, and Novak’s attorney argued that this decision “sets hazardous precedent damaging free expression.”
The Supreme Court heard Novak’s appeal last week, which prompted the Onion to file an amicus brief—a document submitted by an outsider attempting to influence the court.
The brief asserts that the appeals court’s decision “imperils an old mode of discourse” in one of its less humorous passages.
According to the court’s ruling, parodists are only safe if they puncture the balloon beforehand by telling their audience that their parody is untrue. However, some types of humour require the performer to deliver the joke while maintaining a straight face.
According to the filing, parody has a rich history and serves a societal purpose when it “adopts a particular form in order to attack it from inside.”
The Onion uses one of its most famous headlines, “Supreme Court rules Supreme Court rules,” as an example.
The document offers a unique look beyond the comedy veil by explaining how jokes function while also acting more like a conventional legal document by citing pertinent court judgments and employing phrases like “dispositive.”
In a lawsuit that, if the top court decides to take it into consideration, will be considered the following year, the city of Parma has until October 28 to respond.
Meanwhile, “the Onion cannot stand idly by in the face of a ruling that threatens to disembowel a form of rhetoric that has existed for millennia, that is particularly potent in the realm of political debate, and that, purely incidentally, forms the basis of The Onion’s writers’ paychecks,” as stated in the ruling.