The popular satire news site the Onion filed a parody brief to the Supreme Court on Monday in support of an Ohio man charged with publishing a Facebook page that made fun of his local Police Department, urging the court to avoid setting precedent for “imprisoning humorists.”
Describing itself as “the single most powerful and influential organization in human history,” the Onion’s tongue-in-cheek but also serious brief is calling on the justices to take up a case involving Anthony Novak, a Parma, Ohio-based man who was arrested after he created a spoof account for the Parma Police Department.
“As the globe’s premier parodists, The Onion’s writers also have a self-serving interest in preventing political authorities from imprisoning humorists,” attorneys for wrote in a “friend of the court,” or amicus, brief. “This brief is submitted in the interest of at least mitigating their future punishment.”
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The best part of The Onion’s brief is the section that describes what parody is – a look under the hood of The Onion’s writing process: pic.twitter.com/AtkqkuWKgZ
— Christian Schneider (@Schneider_CM) October 3, 2022
Some of Novak’s spoofs included a supposed “pedophile reform event” in which “successful participants could be removed from the sex offender registry and become honorary members of the department after completing puzzles and quizzes.”
Novak was arrested but later acquitted of criminal charges. Still, he subsequently sued the department for violating his First Amendment rights, to which the U.S. 6th District Court of Appeals ruled in May that while the department’s actions may have been excessive, the officers were entitled to “qualified immunity.”
Now, Novak and his attorneys have petitioned the Supreme Court to take up the case. Justices have yet to determine whether to grant him cert.
“The petition for certiorari should be granted, the rights of the people vindicated, and various historical wrongs remedied. The Onion would welcome any one of the three, particularly the first,” attorneys for the satire outlet wrote.
While some elements of the brief included brash statements such as referring to the justices as “total Latin dorks,” the filing itself offered a glimpse of how the satirical outlet describes its own view of parody.
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“The point of all this is not that it is funny when deluded figures of authority mistake satire for the actual news — even though that can be extremely funny,” the outlet wrote in the brief.
“Rather, it’s that the parody allows these figures to puncture their own sense of self-importance by falling for what any reasonable person would recognize as an absurd escalation of their own views,” the outlet added.
