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from the laugh-and-(some-of)-the-world-laughs-with-you dept.
'The Onion' filed a real brief with the Supreme Court supporting man jailed for making fun of cops:
When was the last time you've read an amicus brief? If you're not involved in the legal profession, chances are you may have never actually spent precious time reading one. This amicus brief (PDF) could change that. It was submitted by The Onion, which describes itself in the brief as "the world's leading news publication" with "4.3 trillion" readers that maintains "a towering standard of excellence to which the rest of the industry aspires." [...]
The Onion, of course, is the popular parody website that once named Kim Jong-un as the sexiest man alive. Its team has filed a very real amicus brief with the Supreme Court in support of Anthony Novak, who was arrested and jailed for four days after briefly running a Facebook page parodying the police department of Parma, Ohio back in 2016.
[...] Despite writing the brief in the same voice its publication uses, and despite filling it with outlandish claims and hilarious quips, The Onion made a very real argument defending the use of parody and explaining how it works:
"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.
I highly recommend reading the brief yourself [PDF]. [hubie]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday October 09 2022, @10:45AM (3 children)
To put things into some kind of perspective, Parma was being parodied when I was in junior high school. Dude was on the air, mocking the "Amrap" police, mayor, city council, the dog catcher, and everyone else in the city. Parma is still being parodied after 5 decades? There has to be a lot of material there! Maybe they should burn it down, and start over.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 4, Funny) by kazzie on Sunday October 09 2022, @06:15PM
You'll never manage to burn it down. Big Parma has too many vested interests.
(Score: 2) by HammeredGlass on Sunday October 09 2022, @07:55PM (1 child)
I finally got free of the middle C recently. I can't imagine having to deal with the northern C.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 09 2022, @08:01PM
Then go an octave lower