You don’t have to be a comedian to know that to explain a joke is to ruin a joke. Yet satirical US news site The Onion is doing just that, albeit reluctantly, in an effort to protect the right to tell those jokes without fear of arrest.
The self-declared “world’s leading news publication” filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court this week in support of a man who was arrested and prosecuted for creating a parody Facebook page of his local police department. Anthony Novak’s civil rights lawsuit was dismissed by a district court in April of this year, which led him to ask the Supreme Court to intervene, citing a breach of his violation of First and Fourth Amendment rights.
