Needs a bit more of The Onion, I think...
A surprise acquisition. A hilarious court brief. Parody might come in very handy in the coming years.
The session finished, I lugged the laptop, mic, and camera to the IT guys. We virtually hosted a seminar guest, Christopher Mims of the Wall Street Journal, and it was a great session in spite of having to use Zoom for virtual presence. A student lingered for a while, and we walked together to the West Campus bus stop, recounting the session along the way. As an aside, I told him something I'd learned earlier that morning.
“The Onion bought Infowars,” I told him. “It was a bankruptcy sale, so they probably got it for a song.” (Actually, I learned later that the winning bid was “less than a trillion dollars,” which narrowed it down a bit.)
“Really? That's so perfect!” he replied and then asked if I knew about The Onion’s friend of the court (amicus curiae) brief a while back. I’d heard about it but hadn't read it, just the news bits that bubbled up about The Onion’s brief.
That evening I downloaded the brief from the SCOTUS website.
If you'd glanced at the PDF—say from across a table in a coffee shop—you'd swear it was just like any other brief. Formatted precisely, fitting the form down to the font and other conventions and requirements: a table of contents, “list of authorities" including “other authorities” (e.g., Horace and Mark Twain), and so on. The primary author, Mike Gillis, served as The Onion's head writer for about a decade, so he had been well schooled at America’s Finest News Source.
The Onion skewers formats as part of its editorial job. Associated Press conventions are the starting block for its online and print editions, but in this amicus brief, legal formats serve just as well: “That leverage of form—the mimicry of a particular idiom in order to heighten dissonance between form and content—is what generates parody’s rhetorical power” (Onion, p. 8), the brief notes. The Onion had already wheedled the Supreme Court with the AP-format headline and news story “Supreme Court Rules Supreme Court Rules.” (noted in Onion, p. 7). But its amicus brief takes aim at the form of legal briefs, too, fully ornamented with Latin phrases. “The Onion knows that the federal judiciary is staffed entirely by total Latin dorks,” the brief points out. “They quote Catullus in the original Latin in chambers. They sweetly whisper ‘stare decisis’ into their spouses’ ears.”
In the beginning of section IV, the brief chants fourteen legal Latin terms (Bona vacantia, Ad hominem tu quoque, and, appropriately, Scandalum magnatum, etc.), taking up half of the opening paragraph. To say them all out loud could sound like a lawyerly seduction, I guess. “See what happened?” the authors ask the court. “This brief itself went from a discussion of parody’s function—and the quite serious historical and legal arguments in favor of strong protections for parodic speech—to a curveball mocking the way legalese can be both impenetrably boring and belie the hollowness of a legal position” (Onion, p. 15).
The amicus brief and the acquisition fit together nicely
The Onion’s acquisition of Infowars was partly inspired by a post by @ceej.online on Bluesky, in June 2024, a story that Ben Collins, The Onion’s (real) CEO,1 noted:
There’s a certain luminous meaning that shines from the marriage of The Onion and Infowars, too. The two seem to be at once mutually repelling and, oddly, somewhat compatible. Neither peddles in reality, but one knows and points to a truth (guess which one). The difference between the misdirections of The Onion and Infowars relies on whether or not readers are “reasonable,” and the two websites, at least before the Infowars deal, made completely different assumptions of their readership. The Onion continues to assume “a reasonable reader”; the now-defunct Infowars assumed a gullible one or, worse, a reader content to stay gullible.
And the overlap is deceiving. As “brando37” put it in Bluesky, “I think the best part may be that you can’t tell if The Onion has taken over yet.” Brando’s post screenshotted Infowars, showing an Onion-like headline:
The Onion’s brief lays out its nefarious core assumption:
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. If most readers of parody didn’t live up to this robust standard, then there would be nothing funny about the Chinese government believing that a pudgy dictator like Kim Jong-un was the sexiest man on Earth. Everyone would just agree that it was perfectly reasonable for them to be taken in by the headline.
If Alex Jones’ Infowars had said that Kim Jong-un was the sexiest man on Earth, well, that was because it’s “true.” Full stop.2
While parody might especially fit into the hands of the powerless, it also has no solid ideology, no firmly cemented, hard-boiled truth. It takes whatever literary form—from left or right, believer or non-believer—and pushes to extremes so that form and content consume themselves. Or, better, reveal themselves to show thoughts, prejudices, boo-boos that once were concealed, on purpose or unknowingly. Yes, parody does threaten a bit of corrosion, too; and an “information environment” totally consumed by parody would paradoxically make parody impossible—or at least useless. Maybe bad natured as well.
When The Onion filed its amicus brief, writers at conservative Christian The Babylon Bee and its lawyers raced to file their own brief, not to be outdone by that “cute little upstart known as The Onion” (Bee, p. 2). Despite being on the opposite end of the political spectrum from The Onion, the Bee came down on the same side of the argument. Perhaps grudgingly, the Bee brief says that “The Onion may be staffed by socialist wackos, but in their brief defending parody to this Court, they hit it out of the park” (Bee, p. 4).
On the merits (as a court might say), I do think Onions perform better than Bees in this amicus face-off. The Bees let the lawyers write too much, it seems. Or maybe they were too intimidated by the addressee of their friendly letter, though the Supreme Court of the United States has adeptly managed to deflate its stature since 2022, when the Onion and Bee briefs went to Washington.
Actually, today, it might be easier to send the Most Reverend and Honorable Justices a parody brief, even while it might be harder to write parody, since the world itself seems to mimic parody at times.3
I’d like more of The Onion in the recipe, please
We need parody more than ever. It functions even in repressive circumstances, because it knows the power of laughter in its sly revealings. It does court danger, but its garb is so ludicrous that oppressors have to carefully consider their response. It’s so very easy for the ham-handed and clumsy power to look like self-parody. “Parodists can take apart an authoritarian’s cult of personality, point out the rhetorical tricks that politicians use to mislead their constituents, and even undercut a government institution’s real-world attempts at propaganda” (Onion, p. 9).
I know it’s particularly difficult to parody a foolish regime’s real life actions, when those actions already have stretched the realm of the reasonable to the limit. But parodists at The Onion (and maybe even at The Babylon Bee) can help shake ludicrous discourse and actions back into the real world—by using “ludicrous” discourse.
Got a comment?
Tags: Supreme Court, Infowars, The Onion, parody, satire, politics, Latin, law, legal brief, 6th Circuit, Novak v. City of Parma
Links, cited and not, some just interesting
A fine article from the exceptional Neiman Lab on The Onion’s acquisition: Benton, Joshua. “The Onion Adds a New Layer, Buying Alex Jones’ Infowars and Turning It into a Parody of Itself.” Nieman Lab, November 14, 2024. https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/11/the-onion-adds-a-new-layer-buying-alex-jones-infowars-and-turning-it-into-a-parody-of-itself/.
Treisman, Rachel. “The Man Who Wrote the Onion’s Supreme Court Brief Takes Parody Very Seriously.” NPR, October 4, 2022, sec. National. https://www.npr.org/2022/10/04/1126773469/onion-supreme-court-brief-author-interview.
Cohen, Andrew. “The Onion’s Head Writer Peels the Layers of a Hilarious Amicus Brief Defending Satire.” Berkeley Law, November 18, 2022. https://www.law.berkeley.edu/article/peeling-layers-onion-head-writer-mike-gillis-dishes-on-satire-and-worlds-funniest-amicus-brief/.
There are some good uses for funny and probing parody. It brings for laughter that’s directed at those who need to be laughed at: “Trump has always been obsessed with dramas of dominance and submission, strength and weakness, who is laughing at whom. This is his lens for human relations generally, and particularly when it comes to politics, foreign and domestic.” Remnick, David. “Donald Trump’s Cabinet of Wonders.” The New Yorker, November 17, 2024. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/11/25/donald-trumps-cabinet-of-wonders.
Referred to as “Onion” in the text notes. “Brief of The Onion as Amicus Curiae in Support of Petitioner (Writ of Certiorari; Novak v. City of Parma, Ohio; Supreme Court of the United States, 22-293),” October 2022. https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-293/242292/20221003125252896_35295545_1-22.10.03%20-%20Novak-Parma%20-%20Onion%20Amicus%20Brief.pdf.
Referred to as “Bee” in the text notes. “Brief of The Babylon Bee as Amicus Curiae in Support of Petitioner (Writ of Certiorari; Novak v. City of Parma, Ohio; Supreme Court of the United States, 22-293),” October 28, 2022. https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-293/244213/20221028092221628_Babylon%20Bee%20-%20Amicus%20Brief.pdf.
Don’t be fooled by Ben Collins’ Bluesky handle “Tim Onion.” The actual fake leader of The Onion is Bryce P. Tetraeder, the completely fictional CEO of the equally fictional Global Tetrahedron LLC. Tetraeder announced the Infowars acquisition on The Onion. And what about the vast multivitamin stores held in the cavernous vaults of Infowars? Tetraeder outlined the next steps, saying that “we plan to collect the entire stock of the InfoWars warehouses into a large vat and boil the contents down into a single candy bar–sized omnivitamin that one executive (I will not name names) may eat in order to increase his power and perhaps become immortal.”
To be fair, some readers of The Onion inevitably have trouble with reasonableness—former US Congressmen (John Fleming), the press outside of the US (various, and maybe the unfamiliarity of US press is a valid excuse). These mistakes of the parodic for the real are themselves often funny news items. The Onion’s brief notes that China’s People’s Daily Online took The Onion’s report of the Beloved Leader’s world-beating sexiness as reasonable. The People’s Daily Online page unfortunately shows a “404 Page Not Found” error, but see Bacon, John. “China Paper Falls for Spoof on ‘sexiest’ Korean Leader.” USA TODAY, November 27, 2012. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/11/27/kim-jong-un-onion-satire-sexiest-man-alive/1729655/.
You could say this circumstance gives parody even more power. Even the power of clairvoyance! See, from 2017, “Mar-A-Lago Assistant Manager Wondering If Anyone Coming To Collect Nuclear Briefcase From Lost And Found.” The Onion, March 27, 2017. https://theonion.com/mar-a-lago-assistant-manager-wondering-if-anyone-coming-1819579801/.
That was fun Mark