No Joke: The Onion Makes Its Supreme Court Debut

Supreme Court amicus briefs are usually solemn affairs brimming with weighty questions of law and preoccupied with the fine points of constitutional interpretation. Then there is the latest friend-of-the-court filing from the satirical newspaper the Onion.The facts are themselves the stuff of comedy. The case, Novak v. City of Parma, Ohio, is one in which the Sixth Circuit declined to award damages to a parodist, Anthony Novak, for violations of his First and Fourth Amendment prerogatives. Mr. Novak was earlier arrested and acquitted of the state crime of disrupting police activities by creating a satiric police department website. He spent four days in jail, and had his laptop and cellphone confiscated. That precipitated the appeal for compensation. “Anthony Novak thought it would be funny to create a Facebook page that looked like the Parma Police Department’s. The Department was not amused,” is how the matter was summarized in a wry decision by Judge Amul Tharpar, who rides the Sixth Circuit of the United States Appeals Court.Contributing to the department’s consternation was Mr. Novak’s posting of fraudulent advertisements for abortions provided in the back of a police van and a “Pedophile Reform Event.” The police investigated, obtained a search warrant and discovered that Mr. Novak was behind the prank. While admitting that determining whether Mr. Novak’s actions are “protected speech is a difficult question,” Judge Thapur decided that the officers had ample reason to act with probable cause. This inoculates them against Mr. Novak’s claims for constitutional relief.Mr. Novak’s cavalry, however, has arrived in the form of the brief from the Onion, which calls itself “the world’s leading news publication,” having risen from “humble beginnings as a print newspaper in 1756.” It now, it trumpets, “enjoys a daily readership of 4.3 trillion and has grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human history.”The Onion claims that its editorial board has worked in an “advisory capacity for such nations as China, Syria, Somalia, and the former Soviet Union” and that the paper operates “350,000 full- and part time journalism jobs in its numerous news bureaus and manual labor camps stationed around the world.”The publication notes that as the “globe’s premier parodists, The Onion’s writers also have a self-serving interest in preventing political authorities from imprisoning humorists.” To that end, it sets its sights on a “legal ruling that fails to hold government actors accountable for jailing and prosecuting a would-be humorist simply for making fun of them.”Calling parody an “ancient form of discourse,” the Onion explains that 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.”In other words, “for parody to work, it has to plausibly mimic the original.” The requirement that a parody be evidently fraudulent would “disembowel a form of rhetoric that has existed for millennia” and that “purely incidentally, forms the basis of The Onion’s writers’ paychecks.”While the Onion keeps its tongue firmly implanted in its cheek through the brief, it does argue that the “very heart of parody” is “tricking readers into believing that they’re seeing a serious rendering of some specific form.” For example, it notes how it mimics the “dry tone of an Associated Press news story, aping the clipped syntax and the subject matter” only to veer into parody. It is the feint towards the real, the Onion argues, that elicits the laugh and lands the punch.Using a smattering of legal citations to make common cause with Mr. Novak, the Onion concludes its brief by informing the high court that it would “vastly prefer that sunlight not be measured out to its writers in 15 minute increments in an exercise yard.”

No Joke: The Onion Makes Its Supreme Court Debut

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