The Onion files Amicus brief for 'Latin dorks' on the Supreme Court to defend parody’s First Amendment rights

04 October 2022

On Monday, October 3, attorneys for The Onion filed an Amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court, offering a First Amendment defense of parody and humorously pointing out that sometimes, life imitates art.

“The Onion files this brief to protect its continued ability to create fiction that may ultimately merge into reality,” the brief read. “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.”

The Onion, founded in 1988, has been offering parody for 34 years. In the Amicus brief, The Onion noted its ability to occasionally fool people. None of the articles published in The Onion are meant to be taken seriously, but on occasion, some readers have taken them seriously and didn’t realize they were reading fiction.

Noting the Onion's Latin motto is "Tu stultus es. You are dumb," the brief claims:

"These three Latin words have been The Onion’s motto and guiding light since it was founded in 1988 as America’s Finest News
Source, leading its writers toward the paper’s singular purpose of pointing out that its readers are deeply gullible people. The Onion’s motto is central to this brief for two important reasons. First, it’s Latin. And The Onion knows that the federal judiciary is staffed entirely by total Latin dorks.

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The second reason — perhaps mildly more important — is that the phrase “you are dumb” captures the very heart of parody: tricking readers into believing that they’re seeing a serious rendering of some specific form — a pop song lyric, a newspaper article, a police beat — and then allowing them to laugh at their own gullibility when they realize that they’ve fallen victim to one of the oldest tricks in the history of rhetoric."

“Parody leverages the expectations that are created in readers when they see something written in a particular form,” the Amicus brief explained. “This could be anything, but for the sake of brevity, let’s assume that it is a newspaper headline — maybe one written by The Onion — that begins in this familiar way: ‘Supreme Court Rules….’ Already, one can see how this works as a parodic setup, leading readers to think that they’re reading a newspaper story. With just three words, The Onion has mimicked the dry tone of an Associated Press news story, aping the clipped syntax and the subject matter. The Onion could go even further by putting that headline on its website — which features a masthead and Latin motto, and the design of which parodies the aesthetics of major news sites, further selling the idea that this is an actual news story.”

Occasionally, a real-life news story will be so bizarre that a reporter covering it will write, “This reads like something published by The Onion, but it really happened.”

In the Amicus brief, The Onion’s lawyers argued that a “reasonable reader” should be able to recognize parody when they see it.

The brief stated, “At bottom, parody functions by catering to a reasonable reader — one who can tell (even after being tricked at first) that the parody is not real…. The law turns on the same reasonable-person construct. The reasonable-reader test gauges whether a statement can reasonably be interpreted as stating actual facts, thereby ensuring that neither the least humorous nor the most credulous audience dictates the boundaries of protected speech."

In the Amicus brief, The Onion demonstrated how parody works by reciting some obvious falsehoods but doing so in a dry, newsy fashion.

“In addition to maintaining a towering standard of excellence to which the rest of the industry aspires, The Onion supports more than 350,000 full- and part-time journalism jobs in its numerous news bureaus and manual labor camps stationed around the world, and members of its editorial board have served with distinction in an advisory capacity for such nations as China, Syria, Somalia, and the former Soviet Union,” the brief read. “On top of its journalistic pursuits, The Onion also owns and operates the majority of the world’s transoceanic shipping lanes, stands on the nation’s leading edge on matters of deforestation and strip mining, and proudly conducts tests on millions of animals daily.”

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