The right to satire: is making fun of the police really a crime?

The Onion claims to be “America’s finest news source”, said Dave Pell on NextDraft. And it is, if you’re after satire. Its news parodies “hit the mark like nothing else”. The classic example is its famous headline on the subject of US school shootings: “No Way To Prevent This, Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”

Now the publication itself is in the news: it has gone to the Supreme Court to defend the right of everyone to poke fun at officialdom. Last week, it filed a court brief in support of Anthony Novak, an Ohio man who was arrested and jailed for four days in 2016, after he created a spoof of his local police department’s Facebook page.

The page suggested that the department had outlawed the feeding of homeless people, and discouraged job applications from minorities. Novak later sued the city for damages, claiming his First Amendment right to free speech had been violated. A federal judge dismissed his lawsuit earlier this year, and an appeals court upheld that decision.

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The Onion’s Supreme Court brief is, as you’d expect, not entirely serious, said Jacob Sullum in Reason. In it, the publication claims to have “a daily readership of 4.3 trillion”, and to be “the single most powerful and influential organisation in human history”. But the humour is being deployed with a purpose.

Novak was prosecuted under an Ohio law that forbids using a computer to “disrupt, interrupt, or impair” police services; one of the issues in his case is whether people might reasonably have believed that his spoof site was the real thing.

The courts cited the fact that he had deleted comments describing the page as fake. But, as The Onion points out, parody often relies on first “tricking people into thinking it’s real”, then revealing the joke by piling on absurdities. To demand that people “pop the balloon in advance” by attaching “parody” labels to their work would, argues the brief, neuter satire as a political tool.

This is an important debate, given the key role humour plays in US politics today, said Nicole Hemmer on CNN. “Americans have come to expect politics to come wrapped in parodies, punchlines and primetime pizazz.” Since the 1980s, comedy has become “a primary mode of political expression”; young people get much of their news from programmes such as The Daily Show.

At a time when politics itself has grown increasingly absurd – one Republican congress­woman, Marjorie Taylor Greene, has publicly mused about whether forest fires were started by Jewish space lasers – parody has become harder to pull off.

As The Onion noted in its brief: “Much more of this, and the front page of The Onion would be indistinguishable from The New York Times.” The need for parody is greater than ever: to shine a light on ludicrous claims and to keep people engaged in politics. America must guard against any curbs on it.