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First As Parody, Then As Free Speech: The Onion Goes To The Supreme Court. It's About As Awesome As You'd Suspect.

Tu stultus es, indeed.

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Laughing Smiling Emoji FacePremier news source specializing in pataphysics, The Onion, has taken time from its busy schedule of predicting nefarious events to come and debunking the commonly held myth that girls just want to have fun to defend one of the many rights held within the Ninth Amendment — the right to laughter. There’s probably also some free speech sprinkled in for good measure. And Criminal Law. You really should just look at it yourself.

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 former president kept nuclear secrets strewn around his beach home’s basement three years before it even happened.

The Onion files this brief to protect its continued ability to create fiction that may ultimately merge into reality. As the globe’s premier parodists, The Onion’s writers also have a self-serving interest in preventing political authorities from imprisoning humorists. This brief is submitted in the interest of at least mitigating their future punishment.

Whom else but The Onion could finesse a robust defense of free speech and parody, all while making what might be a sly comparison of the judicial system to Roko’s Basilisk? Please don’t click that. Dear God, unless you plan on ushering in the technological singularity, please don’t click that. You have been warned.

It doesn’t take long into the brief to realize that The Onion’s amicus is no laughing matter. They open with the case of the 6th Circuit giving the okay for police to arrest and jail a man because he threw big meanie words at them on Facebook. In doing so, The Onion plainly states that the court threatened their entire business model. For everyone who had a fictional newspaper teaching 1Ls standing doctrine on their bingo card, please mark it.

This, much like Chidi processing the nuances of Jeremy Bearimy, broke me. The Onion, with a flair of pedagogy that shall never again be seen in Florida now that they’ve gone and banned dictionaries for being too woke, gives a succinct and nuanced legal defense of the old adage that you can’t explain jokes without ruining them.

[T]he 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.

First, appreciate the simplicity of the prose. Second, thank The Onion for this picture in your head. Imagine this brief making it to the Supreme Court and, after being picked up and read by Clarence Thomas, the man finally has a textual basis for developing a sense of humor. I’m just kidding! I hear the man is actually very funny — you should hear his bit about coke cans.

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The brief is nothing less than brilliant. The Associated Press catches a stray for literally no reason, there’s an insightful bit of philology on the origins of parody — and let’s be real, you need something legal adjacent to waste time with on your screen as you bill three months’ worth of time to about 20 documents. You are welcome.

Read the brief here.

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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