The Onion Submits Hilarious Amicus Brief To SCOTUS In Defense Of Parody & Satire Under 1st Amendment

The OG of political satire, The Onion, just submitted an absolutely hilarious amicus brief to the Supreme Court regarding the protection of parody and satire under the 1st amendment. An amicus brief, or amicus curiae brief, literally means a brief from a “friend of the court,” and is presented by a party not involved in the case before the court, but who feels they have relevant information regarding the case.

Honestly, the brief is exactly what you would expect it to be from the creative comedians at The Onion. Their four arguments are:

• Parody Functions By Tricking People Into Thinking That It Is Real;
• Because Parody Mimics “The Real Thing,”
  It Has The Unique Capacity To Critique The Real Thing;
• A Reasonable Reader Does Not Need A Disclaimer To Know That Parody Is Parody; and
• It Should Be Obvious That Parodists Cannot Be Prosecuted For Telling A Joke With A Straight Face.

I’m laughing already and I haven’t even gotten into the meat of the 18 page masterpiece. They hilariously state,

“The Onion’s journalists have garnered a sterling reputation for accurately forecasting future events. One such coup was The Onion’s scoop revealing that a for- mer president kept nuclear secrets strewn around his beach home’s basement three years before it even happened.”

This has been a recurring theme with satire and parody content by The Onion and The Babylon Bee, leaders in the industry, and both of which have published outrageous satire articles which have ultimately come to pass almost exactly as outrageously predicted.

They explain that they are presenting this brief because they heard about the case where “Ohio Police Officers Arrest, Prosecute Man Who Made Fun of Them on Facebook” and a subsequent 6th Circuit ruling. The man made a parody of the police department’s Facebook page, almost identical aside from being verified. The page was only live for about 12 hours because police threatened an investigation after he suggested that the police department was racist and calloused. After a jury found him not guilty of felony interrupting /disrupting law enforcement using a computer, the man sued several officers for violating his 1st amendment rights. But the 6th Circuit recently ruled that the man cannot sue the police officer’s as they have qualified immunity.

The Onion explains that they became “justifiably concerned” following the ruling.

“First, the obvious: The Onion’s business model was threatened. This was only the latest occasion on which the absurdity of actual events managed to eclipse what The Onion’s staff could make up. Much more of this, and the front page of The Onion would be indistinguishable from The New York Times.

Second, 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.

Third, the Sixth Circuit’s ruling imperils an ancient form of discourse. The court’s decision suggests that parodists are in the clear only if they pop the balloon in advance by warning their audience that their parody is not true. But some forms of comedy don’t work unless the comedian is able to tell the joke with a straight face. Parody is the quintessential example. Parodists intentionally inhabit the rhetorical form of their target in order to exaggerate or implode it—and by doing so demonstrate the target’s illogic or absurdity.

Put simply, for parody to work, it has to plausibly mimic the original. The Sixth Circuit’s decision in this case would condition the First Amendment’s protection for parody upon a requirement that parodists explicitly say, up-front, that their work is nothing more than an elaborate fiction. But that would strip parody of the very thing that makes it function.

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.

It’s gorgeous. It really is. You should read it, so here’s the link to the brief. Enjoy.