The American right to humor, straight faced

Why not respond to legalistic absurdity with humor?

Especially if you’re The Onion, America’s funniest newspaper.

The case the parodic paper has signed on to as a friend of the court involves an Ohio man who created a parody Facebook site that humorously pretended to be the actual FB page of the Parma Police Department.

According to the website Law & Crime, “In a slimmer 23-page brief for The Onion, which they admit is a ‘convoluted legal filing intended to deconstruct the societal implications of parody,’ attorneys Stephen J. Stempvoort and D. Andew Portinga opine on the value of parody’s historical importance to humanity, civilization, and America through the use of, well, parody.”

Anthony Novak was arrested and prosecuted in 2016 for making fun of the police department online.

“Novak penned six posts as the fake police department, including an advertisement for a ‘Pedophile Reform event’ in which participants could be removed from the sex offender registry and become an ‘honorary police officer’ by solving ‘puzzles and quizzes,’ that officers had ‘discovered’ an ‘experimental’ abortion procedure they would provide for free to teenagers in a police van, and that the department was soliciting job applicants but that minorities were strongly encouraged ‘to not apply,’” the website continues.

Noting the longtime ability of American humorists to effectively skewer authorities and authority figures with power over the rest of us, The Onion’s lawyers make a serious point about how humor operates:

“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.”

What makes The Onion work so very well, its editors say, has been decades of fooling the “dumb” reader, which has been the paper’s “guiding light since it was founded in 1988 as America’s Finest News Source.”

It is not America’s finest news source. It is America’s funniest news source. But it has to, in its layout and in the straight-face, unsmirking stories it publishes, be able to pretend that its humor is actual news.

Sample headlines from this week: “Kevin Mccarthy Claims Lack Of Mental Health Services In Schools Got Him Where He Is Today.” “Identical Twins Unconcerned After Having Bodies Swapped By Lightning Strike.” “FEMA Requires Flood Victims To Pass Drug Test Before Qualifying For Rescue.” “Man Starting To Suspect Chess Opponent With All Queens Hustling Him.”

The funny thing — the important thing, in the key issues that The Onion is taking on by contributing to the defense of an American man who was merely exercising his freedom-of-speech rights by making light of his local police department — is that the parody site notes in its legal brief that, by doing so, by joining in the defense of someone else’s right to comedic expression, it is endangering its own position as the leading humor outlet around. This guy, Anthony Novak, did such a good job of it that he’s the competition.

But competition is good, The Onion is saying. The more people skewering the powers that be, the better. No one in their right mind, viewing the fake Facebook postings, would believe they were really reading the official site of the Parma Police Department. But by faking readers out for just a moment, Novak made us think. And now, his case is going all the way to the United States Supreme Court, with his lawyers noting, to the highest jurists in the land, that “It Should Be Obvious That Parodists Cannot Be Prosecuted For Telling A Joke With A Straight Face.” To pursue such a prosecution is un-american. May the justices realize, we would hope unanimously this time, right and left, that protecting that right to free speech is the most American thing they can do.