History Main / PoesLaw

* A major RunningGag in WebVideo/QuintonReviews' series of videos on ''Series/ICarly'' and ''Series/{{Victorious}}'' purposely never directly refers to series creator Creator/DanSchneider, always referring to him as [[HeWhoMustBeNamed "the creator"]] and steering away from discussing the many allegations made about him. The final part reveals that this was intended specifically to lampoon fans who just that and try to distance Schneider's reputation from the shows themselves - which the rest of the video goes on to point out is both futile given the sheer creative influence Schneider had on them, and potentially dangerous given how [[InherentToTheSystem it positions Schneider as a convenient scapegoat for systemic problems of working with child stars]]. However, because of the [[{{Doorstopper}} sheer length of the video series]] and how it reached to people with only a passing familiarity with the subject, many assumed he was doing the bit entirely seriously.

* [[http://iglesianuevaera.blogspot.com/2013/08/desenmascarando-dragonball-satanismo-en.html This article in Spanish]] assures that Dragon Ball is a work inspired by Satanism, with evidence such as that "Dragon Ball" means "The beast is coming" - instead of, you know, a Dragon Ball - or that all the names of the characters correspond to real demons. The website is clearly a parody of Christian fundamentalists, but that very article has been cited on Christian forums as real evidence that [[UnfortunateImplications anime is demonic in nature.]]

* Comedian, satirist and social media personality Creator/TonyZaret, whose {{Kayfabe}} persona is of an out of touch DiscoDan trying to [[TotallyRadical relate to teenagers on social media]] [[StylisticSuck and failing]], has somehow managed to parody this concept. Or, at the very least, [[KnowNothingKnowItAll people who falsely invoke it in order to justify falling for and getting angry at obvious satire posts]] such as the ones on his Twitter and Tumblr, try and write witty retorts to show off how they're smarter than him, and [[NeverMyFault blame him for them falling for it]] because they still want to chase the high of "owning" him. On his social media accounts, he commonly makes fake posts from "Jonathan Commentar", an InternetJerk and SmugSnake who [[https://twitter.com/tonyzaret/status/1386767201219354625 invokes Poe's Law to justify ''believing'' an obvious satire post about a pig being elected president]] because [[InsaneTrollLogic "people these days (except for ME) are so stupid"]]. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqcKVY01qQ4&feature=youtu.be In this video for his [=YouTube=] page]] he jokingly explains the concept as "nobody can ever tell what is and is not a joke", using ''Film/AustinPowers'' as an explanation because he assumed it was a documentary, and eventually convincing "Poe" to ''repeal'' the law so [[TakeThat people can finally know what a joke is.]] Lately, he's taken the process a step further by [[SelfDeprecation explaining to any confused commenter that his posts are "engagement bait"]]

* At the First West Coast Computer Faire, Apple engineer Steve Wozniak had made several gag brochures for a successor to the MITS Altair called the "Zaltair." The ad copy was filled with absurd claims, like having 18 expansion card slots, a new "BAZIC" programming language that could be rewritten by the user, and a case that will "add to the decor of any living room." People bombarded the MITS stand with questions about the new model, and it wasn't until late in the day that anyone caught on to the joke. Today, these brochures are highly sought-after collector's items. What made it plausible was Woz's unorthodox sense of humor and that everything listed there ''did'' really exist at that time -- the fictional computer just had little to do with those features. Except maybe 18 expansion slots -- this was how many slots were in the full-feature ''Altair 8800'' MB, though not all of them could be used for expansion.[[note]]MITS' S-100 bus was a passive backplane, and at least three to four slots were taken up by the [[UsefulNotes/CentralProcessingUnit CPU]] board, [[UsefulNotes/RandomAccessMemory memory]] board, I/O board, etc.[[/note]] The first UsefulNotes/ProgrammingLanguage that could be rewritten on the fly [[note]]John [=McCarthy=]'s Lisp[[/note]] was actually invented [[OlderThanTheythink back in '55]], but was virtually unknown in the microcomputer world, and a case might be successfully built that the case that will "add to the decor of any living room" was present in Woz's own work -- the fair was a venue where the Platform/AppleII was first unveiled, and it was the first fruit of Steve Jobs' famous "computer as appliance" philosophy.

* The final 2017 episode of Series/DeadRingers was themed around the premise that UsefulNotes/DonaldTrump had just set off a nuclear war and the world was doomed. The responses to this news portrayed by the episode were deliberately silly (eg Jeremy Corbyn calling for "urgent negotiations" with the ''missiles''), but after the episode aired, the continuity announcer reassured "the concerned woman who phoned" that Trump hadn't really started nuclear war.

* Owing to the ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Thunder#Documents_leaks numerous]]'' leaks of classified or otherwise restricted documents, someone posted a [[https://web.archive.org/web/20230124234141/https://old.reddit.com/r/Warthunder/comments/10j1hqr/congrats_guys_we_did_it/ joke]] about a prospective Raytheon (a large American defense contractor) employee being asked if they played ''VideoGame/WarThunder''. As a result, many people ''truly'' believed that playing ''VideoGame/WarThunder'' was a genuine impediment to obtaining a security clearance or working as a defense contractor. However, Raytheon has [[https://web.archive.org/web/20230124193915/https://videogames.si.com/news/war-thunder-national-security-risk denied]] asking such, stating, "We only look at a person’s education, employment and criminal history when hiring. We’ve never looked into a person’s video game habits and I can’t imagine a case in which we’d have a concern with any game."

* In the ''WesternAnimation/BeavisAndButtHead'' episode "[=Buttniks=]," they wander into a coffee shop and witness a poetry slam. Butt-Head goes on stage and deliberately stinks up the joint to the annoyance of the crowd. Beavis drinks lots of cappuccino (or, as he called it, "Crappuccino") and turns into the Great Cornholio and goes off on an insane incoherent rant. The audience loves it and call it "groundbreaking stuff," instead of recognizing it as the babblings of an overcaffeinated psycho.

* Biz Markie's "Just a Friend" made two VH-1 Top 100 lists (one specifically for SoBadItsGood songs) and was praised for its "sincerity" even though Biz was not only a rapper but also a comedian, and the song's StylisticSuck is played for humor.

* In a combination of this and StealthParody, Music/JethroTull recorded the album ''Thick As A Brick'' as a deliberately over-the-top ''parody'' of [[ConceptAlbum concept albums]] and the ProgressiveRock genre, after the previous album ''Aqualung'' was mistakenly called a concept album by the music press. It is widely considered one of the best progressive rock albums ever made, by music fans and journalists likely unaware that the work was a parody. Bandleader Ian Anderson still gets remarks from fans about how much older the fictitious child prodigy poet (Gerald Bostock) depicted in the cover art and album credits who "wrote" the lyrics to the album must be now in the present day. The follow-up album ''A Passion Play'' is apparently straightforward, despite having the same structure.
** Years later, Anderson also claimed that it was a parody of the concept albums by Music/{{Yes}} and Music/EmersonLakeAndPalmer however at the time ''Thick as a Brick'' was released, neither Yes nor ELP had even released one (Yes' would come two years later with "Tales From Topographic Oceans" and ELP would never release a concept album in their history) so it is quite possible that Anderson is being a bit of an UnreliableNarrator. He would finally embrace the concept in June 2012 when he released "Thick as a Brick 2." Though ELP had the album ''Tarkus'' and King Crimson made ''Lizard'' (both of them having sidelong epics) and Yes and Genesis had a penchant for long songs since the beginning. Maybe the success of ''Thick as a Brick'' helped bring it further into the mainstream, essentially encouraging the trend of concept albums.
* Jimmy Cross' "I Want My Baby Back" was meant to be a mockery of those morbid TeenageDeathSongs from the '50s and '60s, but was voted one of the worst songs of all time by listeners who didn't realize this and mistook it for a [[{{Pun}} dead]]-serious necrophiliac love ballad.
* Music/JohnLegend did a cover of "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlMP7FGYJmk Baby it's Cold Outside]]", while [[TheCoverChangesTheMeaning changing some lyrics]] to make the man call a taxi so that the woman can go home. The commenters can't decide on whether it was an attempt to "clean up" the original song (which is commonly mistaken for being about DateRape when actually the woman was portrayed as wanting to stay with the man but feeling pressured to leave), or a parody of the people who thought the original song was about rape. Some of the people who thought it was a parody point out the awkward rhyme of "scurry" with "Murray", who's apparently the name of the driver.
* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ffZgq3yvB0 "#BetaAsFuck | with Peter Coffin | Song A Day #2160"]] by Music/JonathanMann had several commenters confused on whether the song was a parody or thinking that it is. It seems like a parody based on the several negative comments shown at the beginning and the duo singing about how they're proud to be beta males, a label typically considered negative, but the song is ultimately genuine.
* Music/KatyPerry did an over-the-top spoof of HollywoodSatanism at the 2014 Grammy Awards. Unfortunately, many people missed the joke and assumed she was a real-life Satanist[[note]]nevermind that it's called "Hollywood Satanism" [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin for a reason]][[/note]]. It probably didn't help that, around this same time, her "turbulent" relationship with her fundamentalist Christian parents was being extensively covered by the media.

* Music/{{Eminem}}'s act relies on a lot of CrossesTheLineTwice shock comedy, as part of him playing the character of his evil KayfabeMusic alter-ego, Slim Shady. Even now, his lyrics continue to be mistaken as a sincere expression of Eminem's desire to murder homosexuals, rape women, and so on despite him extensively saying both in interviews and ''within the songs themselves'' that he's [[TheGadfly just saying this stuff to annoy people]]. This started right from when he became famous in 1999 and still is enough to force public JustJokingJustification statements out of him when, for instance, a 2009 song leaks where Slim states he sides with Music/ChrisBrown over Music/{{Rihanna}}, or he comes out with a 2018 song in which he compares his rage to bombing an Music/ArianaGrande concert.

* Music/RandyNewman wrote "Short People" as a parody of bigotry, working on the assumption that the idea of somebody being consumed with hate for... well, short people would be so ridiculous that nobody could fail to get the joke. Cue a large amount of hostile criticism accusing him of cruelly mocking those lacking in height.
* WebVideo/TheRapCritic states this as the problem with Music/{{Kesha}}: She's supposedly a parody of current music, but when "serious" artists are making songs that are just as ridiculous, it's hard to tell.

* Music/TobyKeith:
** The song "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue." Is it a genuine (if a little overheated) expression of PatrioticFervor, or an ironic glorification of the {{Eagleland}} (Flavor 2) mentality? It's really hard to tell. The song starts off sincere and heartfelt enough, but [[MoodWhiplash the abrupt shift from "melancholy" to "kickass"]] is bizarre enough to inspire at least a few self-aware chuckles. It gets even more confusing if you watch the music video, which backs up the lyrics with an intense montage of various U.S. military bombs, missiles, and fighter jets, looking almost like a Technicolor ''Film/DrStrangelove''. On balance: since most country songs don't feature so much violent or militaristic imagery, it's easy to see this as a spoof; however, the song's SugarWiki/AwesomeMusic and throat-grabbing finale make you ''want'' to take it at face value. So, all things being equal, it's all probably being played straight. According to Keith himself, he originally wasn't going to record the song ''at all''; it was intended to be used only in live shows for military personnel until he was talked into recording it when they loved it. So it's almost certainly dead straight, but the context changes it. Glorifying America's military wrath ''to the military itself'' isn't quite the same as just shouting it in the street (especially when one factors in the military's distinct penchant for BlackComedy).
** There's also his more overtly satirical "American Ride" from 2009, which got him considerable heat from both the political right and left for its political barbs. But as several music critics and Keith himself pointed out, the song pokes fun at ''both'' sides of the political spectrum. (It's also one of the only singles in his career that he didn't write.)

* [[https://youtu.be/zNEqNxwQGDo?si=-sRm1jrCjwH_Yn4s “Corazones Rojos”]] by Music/LosPrisioneros is a very ironic song that criticizes the misogynistic mindset. However, lyrics such as “If you complain, The door is there, You are not allowed to give your opinion”, “We want to see you at home, Doing laundry, thinking about him, With gnarly hands, And a very juicy crotch” and “This story will continue, This order will continue, Because God wanted it that way, Because God is a man too” tend to be proudly quoted by people who didn’t detect the sarcasm.

* The Music/BeastieBoys claim that their "You Gotta Fight for Your Right to Party" song is actually meant to mock party-goers and the whole 1980s party scene, but it's universally appreciated as a party song. This applies to much of ''Licensed To Ill,'' their debut album, in general; it was a frat boy classic at the time, but the band became pretty embarrassed about the content in later years. [=MCA=] openly denounced their previous treatment of women in their 1994 single "Sure Shot."

* Comedian and social media personality Creator/TonyZaret, whose StylisticSuck persona is of an out of touch DiscoDan trying to [[TotallyRadical relate to teenagers on social media]], has somehow managed to parody this concept. Or, at the very least, [[KnowNothingKnowItAll people who falsely invoke it in order to justify falling for obvious satire]] such as the stuff he posts, try and write witty retorts to show off how they're smarter than him, and [[NeverMyFault blame him for them falling for it]] because they still want to chase the high of "owning" him. On his Twitter and Tumblr accounts, he commonly makes fake posts from "Jonathan Commentar", an InternetToughGuy and SmugSnake who [[https://twitter.com/tonyzaret/status/1386767201219354625 invokes it to justify ''believing'' an obvious satire post about a pig being elected president]] because [[InsaneTrollLogic "people these days (except for ME) are so stupid"]]. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqcKVY01qQ4&feature=youtu.be In this video for his [=YouTube=] page]] he jokingly explains the concept as "nobody can ever tell what is and is not a joke". Lately, he's taken the process a step further by [[SelfDeprecation explaining to any confused commenter that his posts are "engagement bait"]]

* Comedian and social media personality Creator/TonyZaret, whose StylisticSuck persona is of an out of touch DiscoDan trying to [[TotallyRadical relate to teenagers on social media]], has somehow managed to parody this concept. Or, at the very least, [[KnowNothingKnowItAll people who falsely invoke it in order to justify falling for obvious satire]] such as the stuff he posts, try and write witty retorts to show off how they're smarter than him, and [[NeverMyFault blame him for them falling for it]] because they still want to chase the high of "owning" him. On his Twitter and Tumblr accounts, he commonly makes fake posts from "Jonathan Commentar", an InternetToughGuy and SmugSnake who [[https://twitter.com/tonyzaret/status/1386767201219354625 invokes it to justify ''believing'' an obvious satire post about a pig being elected president]] because [[InsaneTrollLogic "people these days (except for ME) are so stupid"]]. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqcKVY01qQ4&feature=youtu.be In this video for his [=YouTube=] page]] he jokingly explains the concept as "nobody can ever tell what is and is not a joke]]. Lately, he's taken the process a step further by [[SelfDeprecation explaining to any confused commenter that his posts are "engagement bait"]]

%%Examples involving Twitter, Website/YouTube, Blogs, other social media, and comment sections (et al.) belong under "Web - Misc".

* In the {{crossover}} story ''ComicBook/BatmanAndCaptainAmerica'', ComicBook/TheJoker teams up with the ComicBook/RedSkull, only to break off their partnership when he discovers Red Skull is a legitimate Nazi. He had mistaken his getup as merely being a Nazi-themed gimmick and [[EvenEvilHasStandards was disgusted when the truth was revealed]].

** In their review of ''Film/ScoobyDoo'', [[spoiler:his younger self]] defends the movie by claiming that it's making fun of the show's pointless celebrity cameos. The Critic responds that no, the movie just ''has'' pointless celebrity cameos.

* [[https://youtu.be/3m5qxZm_JqM "John Clarke and Bryan Dawe"]] were a New Zealand/Australian comedy duo that satirized politicians and other public figures. A quick glance at the comments on the Website/YouTube page shows how many people thought they were for real. Given that each of those sketches involved John Clarke playing all of the political figures without any change in voice, costume, or makeup, anyone who watched more than one should have very quickly realized that he was not both Prime Minister Rudd and Senator Stephen Conroy, but was in fact a sketch comedian. Also, [[WholesomeCrossdresser he was not Rudd's successor, Julia Gillard]].

* ''Fanfic/HogwartsSchoolOfPrayerAndMiracles'' ([[https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10644439/1/Hogwarts-School-of-Prayer-and-Miracles found here]]), allegedly written by a Christian mom. Some believe that the author is dead serious, while others are convinced that it's blatant satire. The final chapter [[spoiler:reveals it all to be a troll, though, with the author (through Voldemort) not-so-subtly calling out everyone who thought it was legit.]]

* Prior to the release of Creator/JamesCameron's sci-fi epic ''Film/{{Avatar}}'', a curious blog popped up called [[http://stopavatarmovie.blogspot.com/ "Stop Avatar Movie".]] The blog's editor claims to be a transgender woman who is offended by the "heterosexual themes" found in the movie (namely, the apparent lack of non-heterosexual, non-cisgender characters), and urges people to boycott it. She goes so far as to make ''Avatar'' the scapegoat for anything in the wider culture that is or could be remotely construed as homophobic/transphobic, regardless of whether or not the thing or incident being discussed has anything to do with the film. The political and social views expressed on the blog are so extreme that even actual gay people are divided on whether the author is just a very dedicated troll, or legitimately insane. For all we know, the blog could have been started to covertly ''help'' the film. At one point, the writer actually encourages the offended to ''buy tickets'' and then not see the movie.
* In his review of the film ''Film/{{Bamboozled}}'', Creator/RogerEbert noted that most movie-going audiences wouldn't catch onto the film's satire about how black people are portrayed in modern media. People would simply get pissed off at the mere use of {{Blackface}}. Indeed, [[AudienceAlienatingPremise the film ended up a box-office bomb as a result.]]

* For that matter, ''Film/{{Heathers}}'' (of which ''Mean Girls'' is a sort of LighterAndSofter SpiritualSuccessor) was originally meant to be nothing more than a spoof of high school shooting cases, even taking place in [[FlyoverCountry suburban Ohio]] to make things all the more ridiculous. Many people, however, interpreted the film as a genuine deconstruction of high school cliques and teen movie clichés, and it was soon branded a top-tier high school movie.

* ''Film/JosieAndThePussycats'': The ProductPlacement was parodied by way of cranking it up even though the movie did not make any money off the products and the entire plot of the movie was parodying how media is used to sell products. However, about half the audience and critics got it as self-referential satire, while the other half just thought it had way too many product placements.
* ''Film/AKnightsTale'': Upon release, some movie critics somehow mistook it for a genuine Middle Ages PeriodPiece and castigated the movie for its AnachronismStew. The movie is actually an AffectionateParody and deliberate ClicheStorm of sports stories only [[RecycledInSpace in the Middle Ages with knights]], so any historical errors were entirely intentional. The filmmakers joke about this on the DVD commentary, remarking that you'd think they'd have gotten the hint when the movie opens with medieval peasants singing "We Will Rock You" by {{Music/Queen}}.

* ''Literature/HarryPotter'' writer J.K. Rowling has had problem with WordOfGod on the matter. You see, she made the mistake of giving a random extra in the first book the same family name as Harry Potter's very own mother. The boy in question was called Mark Evans. Once Harry's mother's name was revealed (this was before ''The Half-Blood Prince'' was released), fans began speculating that Mark would become very, very relevant to the plot and asked Rowling if that was the case. Amused by how far the rumor had gotten, she joked that he was indeed a major character and that he was, in fact, the mysterious Half-Blood Prince the upcoming book was named after. ''Everybody took it dead seriously'', to the point that someone went and created a page for Mark Evans on [[Website/{{Wikipedia}} The Other Wiki]].

** A Website/CollegeHumor [[http://www.collegehumor.com/post/7020700/jk-rowling-knows-way-too-much-about-her-characters article]] detailing fake WordOfGod claims from Rowling got widely accepted as real on a lot of sites, including such facts as Dumbledore being a top, Lupin having "exceedingly large genitals", Cho Chang taking "monster shits", and the Hufflepuff dorm being known for "group masturbation sessions." It doesn't help that it started with the real claim that Anthony Goldstein is Jewish.

* According to the introduction when it was printed in ''Across the Wall'' when Creator/GarthNix posted "[[https://web.archive.org/web/20080723105042/http://www.garthnix.com/garbeliad.html My New Really Epic Fantasy Series]]" on his website he received a few emails from people who took it as a serious outline despite all the signs that it was a joke (such as the book titles that were parodies of other famous fantasy works).

* One [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAmuZHsD70s recurring]] [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SBzuG_-O2o segment]] of ''Series/TheChasersWarOnEverything'' played subtitled clips from more extreme Middle-Eastern television shows which decried the west in the most ridiculous ways possible, including ''Series/TomorrowsPioneers'', a Palestinian childrens' show ripping off Mickey Mouse but encouraging hatred of the west in children. Given what the ''War on Everything'' is normally like, one would expect the subtitling to be a GagSub, an exaggeration for comedic purposes. It turns out it's legit -- they had to put in a NotMakingThisUpDisclaimer establishing that Creator/TheABC had independently confirmed the legitimacy and accuracy of the subtitles.

* After Gordon Ramsay's creative insults in ''Series/HellsKitchen'' and ''Series/KitchenNightmares'', a lot of people thought [[https://youtu.be/PV3_UHG73oQ the "Idiot Sandwich"]] line was from an actual show. It actually came from a parody of Hell's Kitchen called "Hell's Cafeteria", wherein two talk show hosts play the role of contestants.

* Various {{Point And Laugh Show}}s (both {{Talk Show}}s and RealityTV) occasionally feature (dis)honored guests that are ''so'' over-the-top that no one in the audience can be certain whether they're for real, actors, or some combination thereof.

* When {{Music/Kid Rock}}'s 2021 collaboration with Monster Truck "Don't Tell Me How to Live" was released, its anti-left lyrics were so pronounced and seemingly exaggerated that, coupled with its rap-rock sound that was more reminiscent of his earlier works and its video that was so amateurish that it seemed like it had to be StylisticSuck, people began to seriously wonder if it wasn't a Music/WeirdAl parody of him. [[https://uproxx.com/indie/weird-al-yankovic-kid-rock-dont-tell-me-how-to-live/ Weird Al himself quickly clarified that no, this wasn't one of his, Kid Rock really did make this song.]]

* Music/{{Eminem}}'s act relies on a lot of CrossesTheLineTwice shock comedy, as part of him playing the character of his evil KayfabeMusic alter-ego, Slim Shady. Even now, his lyrics continue to be mistaken as a sincere expression of Eminem's desire to murder homosexuals, rape women, and so on despite him extensively saying both in interviews and ''within the songs themselves'' that he's [[TheGadfly just saying this stuff to annoy people]]. This started right from when he became famous in 1999 and still is enough to force public JustJokingJustification statements out of him when, for instance, a 2009 song leaks where Slim states he sides with Music/ChrisBrown over Music/{{Rihanna}}, or he comes out with a 2018 song in which he compares his rage to bombing a Music/ArianaGrande concert.

** The blog [[http://literallyunbelievable.org/ Literally Unbelievable]] chronicles people taking ''Onion'' and ''[=ClickHole=]'' articles at face value and posting about them on Facebook. It is as hilariously depressing as it sounds. Poe's Law applies recursively here, as it's impossible to tell whether the Facebookers are just playing along with the joke.

** A high-profile victim of ''The Onion'' is US Congressman John Fleming (R-LA), who posted a link to the [[http://www.theonion.com/articles/planned-parenthood-opens-8-billion-abortionplex,20476/ "Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex" story]] [[http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2012/02/congressman-falls-months-old-onion-story-about-planned-parenthood-abortionplex/48344/ on his Facebook page.]]

* While ''The Onion'' is perhaps the most famous satire newspaper on this list, other satire newsletters and satire news sites like ''The Daily Currant'' and ''Magazine/WeeklyWorldNews'' can also fall victim to this. One famous example from the ''Daily Currant'' happened when marijuana was legalized in Colorado on January 1, 2014. They published a story titled "[[http://dailycurrant.com/2014/01/02/marijuana-overdoses-kill-37-in-colorado-on-first-day-of-legalization/ Marijuana Overdoses Kill 37 in Colorado On First Day of Legalization]]", which naturally got well circulated on social media and elsewhere. Apparently, it was so convincing that Annapolis, Maryland Police Chief Michael Pristoop [[http://reason.com/blog/2014/02/25/citing-joke-annapolis-police-chief-testi cited it]] [[http://rt.com/usa/marijuana-legal-maryland-satire-927/ when testifying in front of the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee]] about the legalization, having overlooked the three clues that it was a satire:

* [[https://youtu.be/wacfY-w0Vjc&feature=youtu.be Michael Savage debates a pro-amnesty liberal over the Arizona immigration laws]], and outright {{lampshade|Hanging}}s this.

* [[http://www.theworld.org/2012/11/satirical-serbs-go-global/ This story]] from Creator/{{NPR}}'s ''The World''. The Serbian satire website [[http://www.njuz.net/ NJUZ]] (pronounced "nyews", and self-admittedly ''The Onion'' [-[[RecycledInSpace IN THE BALKANS!]]-]) ran a fake story about a Serbian man who got drunk and jumped in the ocean, and landed on a shark, killing it. Macedonia's official news agency got hold of it and ran it as a real story, and things went downhill from there.

** Renew America's far-right pundit, Austin Miles, [[http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/miles/140709 reported in a column]] that Obama spent his 4th of July of 2014 at a Mosque and invited Muslims to be with him at the White House, as well as saying that Michelle Obama is a transgender woman originally named "Michael [=LaVaughn=] Robinson", his sources turned out to be a satirical [[http://nationalreport.net/obama-visit-mosque-host-muslim-leaders-july-4th/ article]] of NationalReport and this [[http://www.knowthelies.com/node/8893 joke website]].

* A woman was arrested in 2015 for using a counterfeit $5 bill; she claimed she thought [[http://theskunk.org/2009/02/obama-wants-citizens-to-print-their-own-money/ this story]] from ''The Skunk'' was true. ([[http://www.wesh.com/national-news/police-woman-passes-fake-5-claims-obama-legalized-it/34218100 This story may be a warning for what occurs when Poe's Law is implied.)]]
* Since the end of 2013, there has been a lot of debate in the Netherlands regarding the jolly helpers of their depiction of Saint Nicholas, since these helpers [[http://www.vrijalmelo.nl/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/intocht_zwarte_pieten.jpg look like a toned down blackface]]. In early September 2014, the manufacturers of Playmobil dropped the production of figures that depict this helper. In response to this, a newspaper columnist proceeded to write a faux news article claiming that some people managed to ban a chocolate spread from a Dutch supermarket chain because they found it to symbolize Apartheid [[InsaneTrollLogic by having brown and white spread divided in 6ths in one jar, rather than being one uniform blend.]] The article states that the fictitious protesters argued that the higher-ups of the store chain "wouldn't argue that it was a harmless kids spread [[GodwinsLaw if Hitler would have]] [[HitlerAteSugar had it on his sandwiches]]" and were actually taken seriously. Many people have already taken this seriously, likely by taking the article's header and its presence in a newspaper at face value without noticing it was a column.
* Tends to happen often with Venezuela's NewsParody website ''[[Blog/ElChiguireBipolar El Chigüire Bipolar]]'', but one example that stands out is the article [[http://www.elchiguirebipolar.net/04-02-2011/%E2%80%9Cchavez-es-la-salvacion-de-venezuela%E2%80%9D-dice-oposicion-de-1992/ "Chávez is Venezuela's salvation" says 1992's opposition]], whose fake newspaper page was used on state television and in textbooks, as the updates show.

* [[https://www.19fortyfive.com/2021/06/a-yale-conference-was-tricked-into-thinking-china-claimed-the-pacific-ocean/ A Yale conference on international relations]] fell for a ''Website/MinistryOfHarmony'' story about [[http://www.miniharm.com/2014/08/27/chinas-world-map-claims-hawaii-micronesia/ China claiming Hawaii and Micronesia]].

-->"Fun game: try to post a Website/YouTube comment so stupid that people realize you must be joking. (Hint: [[FailureIsTheOnlyOption this is impossible.]])"

* [[http://dailycurrant.com/2013/05/16/ann-coulter-walks-out-of-star-trek-claims-too-many-minorities/ This article]] from the satirical newspaper ''The Daily Currant'' claiming that Ann Coulter stormed out of a showing of ''Film/StarTrekIntoDarkness'' yelling that ''Franchise/StarTrek'' had "too many minorities". At least half the comment section missed the joke, although a possible explanation is that after some of the stuff Coulter really ''has'' said, it's easy to believe.

* Popehat closed their [[http://www.popehat.com/2009/07/22/north-korean-twitter-account-not-genuine/ fake Twitter account]] for North Korea's propaganda ministry after legitimate news agencies started picking up stories from it.
* When [[http://www.freeratio.org/index.php/ Internet Infidels Discussion Board]] decided to start a contest of making parodies of the creationist organization [[http://www.answersingenesis.org/ Answers in Genesis]] cartoons, they received a cease and desist letter from the latter claiming that the parodies "clearly (are) likely to cause confusion as to the affiliation between your client and my client..." Here's [[http://web.archive.org/web/20021001201944/http://answersingenesis.org/CreationWise/Cartoons/July98CW2.gif an example]] and [[http://web.archive.org/web/20120220011128/http://www.animecritic.com/_temp/parody-July98CW2.gif a parody]].

* [[https://youtu.be/EcCvvJWyx4c&feature=player_embedded PolitiChicks]], a right-wing "answer" to The View, has led to endless discussion in the comment section (as well as on [[http://www.gay.net/politics/2011/11/16/antigay-talk-show-launched-victoria-jackson a]] [[http://www.goodasyou.org/good_as_you/2011/11/video-anti-islam-anti-gay-pro-watching-toonces-drive-a-car.html number]] of [[http://joemygod.blogspot.com/2011/11/teabagger-politichicks.html other]] [[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/16/victoria-jackson-politichicks-web-show_n_1097796.html sites]]) about whether it's serious or a parody.

* A Website/YouTube user named Tamtampamela had a channel on which she posed as a satire of fundamentalist Christians, but when she put up a video thanking God for the Japanese earthquake, saying that he had caused it to punish Japan's atheist population, it immediately went viral and she started receiving death threats, causing her to eventually come clean that it was a parody.
* Just as Website/YouTube user potholer54 was about to nominate a creationist for his 2008 Golden Crocoduck Award (given to the creationists who knowingly and most effectively lied to support their arguments), the creationist outed himself as a satirist. Despite this, potholer explained that one of his arguments (the rings of Saturn prove a young solar system) is actually used by some creationists. [[https://youtu.be/ztejNZIZdsU Watch for yourself here.]]

* P.Z. Myers fell victim of this in [[http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/09/20/this-is-our-opposition/#comments this blog post]] where he rants about an anti-feminism Website/YouTube video while labeling it as "Our Opposition". Some of the commentators of his blog [[GenreSavvy started invoking this law]], pointing out that it was so over-the-top it had to be a parody, only to be dismissed by the rest of the commentators and P.Z. himself. Then the original poster of the video made a [[https://youtu.be/3thZ135aPhE response video]] {{MST}}ing and mocking P.Z. and his commentators for taking it at face value.

* [[https://youtu.be/GcpsqiqXBcw Islamic State of Donbass and Lugant]], a parody of jihad videos by pro-Russian insurgents in eastern Ukraine, complete with ''nasheed'' (Islamic acapella chants) & their flag modified to include Islamist symbolism. Ukrainian & other commenters mistake them as actual Islamist terrorists, while the Russians are joking about their [[UsefulNotes/OrthodoxChristianity Orthodox]] [[ChurchMilitant "jihad"]]. There are Muslim volunteers fighting on the pro-Russian side, but '''NONE''' of them are radical Islamists related with the jihadist movements.

* One of Steven Crowder's earliest videos in the mid-2000s was a sequence of celebrity impressions with his brother. Crowder claims it was [[BadBadActing intentionally bad]] to lampoon a wave of bad impression videos going around on Website/YouTube at that time, but most commenters didn't get the joke.

* {{WebVideo/MarioTehPlumber}} is an infamous ''VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog'' "fan" who "reviews" video games in the eponymous franchise on Website/YouTube. The "reviews" in question consist mostly of [[SensoryAbuse screaming into the microphone]], [[ClusterFBomb Cluster]][=/=][[AtomicFBomb Atomic F-Bombs]] [[SirSwearsALot every other word]], research failures galore, and [[SkewedPriorities "Character design > Gameplay" priorities]] complete with [[FreudWasRight sexual interpretations of characters and objects intended to be nothing of the sort]] -- so naturally he was laughed out of the fanbase as a {{troll}} in a matter of moments, right? Unfortunately, the ''Sonic the Hedgehog'' fanbase is infamous for being extremely [[BrokenBase divided]], made worse by a significant VocalMinority of [[FanDumb overzealous fans]]. The result is that it took several ''years'' before it became widely agreed that [=MarioTehPlumber=]'s immature behaviour is a fake personality and not sincere.

* The promotional video for ''Advertising/{{Cryptoland}}'', a plan by cryptocurrency enthusiasts to build a community on a Fijian island, was widely mocked once it was discovered by the internet at large due to its crude 3D animation, creepy and offputting mascot character, dialogue and location names consisting mostly of cringeworthy crypto in-jokes, inexplicable musical numbers, and the concept alone inviting unflattering comparisons to the disastrous [[Horrible/MusicFestivals Fyre Festival]]. Because of all this, the whole thing can come off like a scathing StealthParody of the culture surrounding crypto, with [[https://thenextweb.com/news/welcome-to-cryptoland-real-island-cryptocurrency-fans-analysis an article on the subject]] calling it "closer to a crypto satire than a sales pitch". However, whether the project is genuine or just a scam, it's clear the video wasn't meant to be seen as a joke, as evidenced by the fact the creators took it down from their [=YouTube=] channel in response to the mockery, and started issuing legal threats in an effort to silence their critics.

* In "ROBLOX_OOF.MP3", WebVideo/HBomberguy starts to dig deeper and deeper into Tommy Tallarico's history of making shit up to make himself look better, steadily growing more and more exasperated at the sheer volume and audacity of lies. It comes to a head when Harry hits what he calls the "Tallarico Event Horizon" -- Tommy posted a picture of himself standing next to the Dalai Lama on the Atari Age website, claiming that he just happened to run into him in London and that he was a fan of Tommy's work. Harry then discovers that the photo was of a ''wax sculpture'' of the Dalai Lama, and ''loses his mind'' completely, because he's heard Tommy say ''so many'' BlatantLies, he genuinely can't tell if he's joking or not.

* In one ''[[ComicBook/{{Viz}} Sid the Sexist]]'' strip, Sid managed to score a bird on Blind Date because she thought he was a comedian and only pretending to be a perverted Geordie stereotype.

* A significant plot point in ''Film/GlassOnion''. It takes [[GreatDetective Benoit Blanc]] longer then it should to solve the case because there are so many stupid and amateurish mistakes made in the crimes committed (murdering somebody at the most suspicious time imaginable, not immediately disposing of damning evidence, committing crimes while a detective is present, stealing ideas for crimes from things people said mere hours ago, etc.) that Blanc discounts the real culprit [[spoiler:Miles Bron]], on the basis that it doesn't make sense for a man as seemingly intelligent as [[spoiler:Bron]] be so foolish, even entertaining the possibility that someone is framing [[spoiler:Bron]] because of how thoroughly all the evidence points to him. As it turns out, no, [[spoiler:Bron]] did it. He's [[FeigningIntelligence a clueless moron who's good at sounding smarter than he actually is]]. He really did genuinely do all those monumentally stupid things while committing his crimes, because he really is just that incompetent. This is, in fact, the point behind the DoubleMeaningTitle; a Glass Onion, as observed by Blanc, is something that has many layers, yet is ultimately see-through and has an obvious answer.

* Inverted, discussed, and PlayedForLaughs in the German novel ''Literature/ErIstWiederDa'' ("Look Who's Back"). In it, UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler somehow ends up in present day Germany and ends up becoming a media sensation because everyone mistakenly thinks he's just a hardcore method actor/comedian who refuses to break character. He repeatedly goes on massive spiels expressing his old views and is completely serious, but everyone thinks he's satirizing his own ideals by acting like a LargeHam UnsympatheticComedyProtagonist. Near the end Hitler even ends up getting assaulted by a group of Neo-Nazis who think he's mocking the real Hitler's legacy. Hitler, however, fully plans on exploiting his newfound popularity, and at the end, he chillingly declares that he feels ready to try his hand at a comeback in politics.

* In the humorist George Mikes's book about his time in Japan, ''Land of the Rising Yen'', he describes his attempts at writing haiku, and claims that his Japanese friends were so complimentary, he became uncertain who was pulling whose leg.

* An Indian funny fairytale tells the story about the dogs trying to get a president. Unsurprisingly, it goes like in a kennel, every candidate was rejected, until a little cur suggested to vote for the dog who smelled good from behind. This clearly was meant sarcastically, but was critically acclaimed, and [[JustSoStory since that day]] two dogs greet by [[AssShove ramming their nose into the other's ass]]. (And they still haven't found a prez...)

** Also discussed in his review of ''VideoGame/SouthParkTheStickOfTruth'' where he pointed out that his normal reviewing style isn't very effective for deliberately-crass comedy games like this one.

* ''WesternAnimation/BojackHorseman'': Sarah Lynn's teen pop musical career was a [[TakeThatAudience long winded critique]] of the teen-pop mindset (e.g. "My Heinie Isn't Too Tiny"). However, her demographic were supporters of that lifestyle and not wanting to lose them, she walked the line by settling on {{Indecisive|Parody}} {{Deconstructive Parod|y}}ies. This left her very disillusioned over her fans and how she was perceived and heard, which was the beginning of a long, painful burnout...

** The episode "[[Recap/SouthParkS14E2TheTaleOfScrotieMcBoogerballs The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs]]" has this happen: After being excited to read ''Literature/TheCatcherInTheRye'' after hearing it used to be banned, and ending up disappointed when they don't find anything particularly controversial or offensive in it, the kids set out to write a deliberately offensive story that ''deserves'' to get banned. The adults find it, and despite it being so disgusting that nobody can read a single sentence without [[VomitIndiscretionShot puking their guts out]], they all believe that it's a great literary work [[EveryoneIsJesusInPurgatory full of profound symbolism]], even after the kids explicitly tell them that it is nothing more than a string of gross-out attempts on paper, and that there is no actual story in it.
** The 16th season episode "Sarcastaball" revolves around a game which Randy invents as parody, but which everyone else takes seriously.

* [[http://iglesianuevaera.blogspot.com/2013/08/desenmascarando-dragonball-satanismo-en.html This article in spanish]] assures that Dragon Ball is a work inspired by Satanism, with evidences such as that "Dragon Ball" means "The beast is coming" - instead of, you know, a Dragon Ball - or that all the names of the characters correspond to real demons. The website is clearly a parody of Christian fundamentalists, but that very article has been cited on Christian forums as real evidence that [[UnfortunateImplications anime is demonic in nature.]]

* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Novello "Don Novello"]] (aka [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Guido_Sarducci "Father Guido Sarducci"]]) wrote a series of letters in the 1970's and 80's to various politicians, corporations and famous people under the persona "Lazlo Toth" (named after the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laszlo_Toth "man who vandalized Michelangelo's Pieta"]]). The Toth persona was a parody of a low-information Nixon supporter: jingoistic, clueless, earnest, and maddeningly obtuse. It is the printed pre-cursor to Stephen Colbert. The targets of his correspondence often took his letters at face value and sent sincere replies. Occasionally "Toth" would string them along through several rounds. One example: Toth wrote a letter to the "Mr Bubble" corporation asking how he was supposed to use the product given the admonition on the box to "KEEP DRY". An excerpt from the lengthy reply: "It is true, we do say on our box: Free Flowing 'MR BUBBLE' must be kept dry. By this statement we mean that the box of powder should be protected against dampness, such as moisture in the bathroom if the box is not put away. The box of 'MR. BUBBLE' should be closed and placed in a cabinet until the next use. Some people tell us they transfer the 'MR BUBBLE' powder to a plastic container, or even a large coffee can, to keep dampness out of the powder. Some have mentioned they keep a measuring scoop in the can for convenient measuring of the proper mount of powder to use in each bath. Over-use is only wasteful." If you want to read the correspondence with VP's Agnew and Ford, H.R. Haldeman, UsefulNotes/McDonalds (about jelly on the egg [=McMuffin=]), Mayor Rizzo or J. Edgar Hoover, buy the book [[https://openlibrary.org/books/OL1706423M/The_Lazlo_letters "The Lazlo Letters"]].

* Performance artists The Yes Men made a career out of this during the Bush administration. One of their projects included passing out [[http://web.archive.org/web/20160419000959/http://theyesmen.org/petitions/pdfs/petition-terrorathome.pdf surveys under their "Yes, Bush Can!" slogan letterhead]], urging people at Republican rallies to specify the rights they were willing to waive in the name of the War on Terror. They had assumed people would be shocked, but instead the audiences filled them out and turned them back in. Before reaching unavoidable notoriety, the Yes Men had managed to pull off their satire so effectively, that serious business and economic forums were ''inviting'' them to speak, which they gleefully accepted. One such presentation of note, given at an international textile industry conference, had them deconstructing the U.S. Civil War as secretly fought because the North didn't want to lose access to cheap Southern cotton, and ended with them demonstrating a prototype employee-monitoring device that hangs off the user and resembles a giant golden penis. The audience ate it up. The Yes Men themselves expressed astonishment at just how far into the absurd they could go and still have so-called professional audiences taking them seriously.
* Swedish humor show ''Series/{{Grotesco}}'' featured a song called ''Det är bögarnas fel'' ("It's the gay men's fault") which became a hit and can be watched [[https://youtu.be/T1lvMJ-l0_A here.]] It's a textbook example of this trope. The song is sung by a reverend who claims that gay men are to blame for every single bad thing in the world and sings that "I don't know the line and verse, chapter or part, but somewhere in [the Bible] it says that it's the gay men's fault." He and lots of other singers then go on to give gay men the blame for things that clearly aren't gay men's fault. One woman sings that "My son shot four people to death with the hunting-rifle. Somehow, I feel that it's the gay men's fault." A man sings that "I once ate porridge and confused curry for cinnamon, and that wasn't carelessness; no, it was the gay men's fault." It's almost impossible to imagine how it could be more obviously satiric, and ''still,'' when it was performed live on the family show ''Allsång på Skansen,'' somebody reported the show to the police for being upsetting to homosexuals.

* Stand-up comedienne Suzi Ruffell got into trouble for a stand-up routine intended to illustrate how white British people, without intending to and with the best of intentions, can come over as being somewhat racist. Before she knew it she was being dubbed "racist comedian Suzi Ruffell" and similar inaccurate descriptions.

* The "Pony Plot Perfection Project", a supposed fan project (which insists it's ''totally'' not sexually motivated) to edit episodes of ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'' to avert AnimalsLackAttributes, which, given stereotypes about the show's fandom, would have been ''very'' potent ammunition for their detractors if true. [[https://www.deviantart.com/pppproject/journal/PPPP-April-Fools-362962878 The project lead eventually admitted to being a troll]] (the fact that their logo was a Swastika made of P's should have made this obvious), but the confession was posted on AprilFoolsDay and [[https://trixiebooru.org/forums/pony/topics/pppproject-anatimically-correct-episodes-where-to-find-them-now some some fans claim to have seen actual episodes edited in this way]], so whether it's a joke, real, or a joke that some people took seriously enough to make true is still up in the air.

* ''Film/{{Borat}}'' was criticized by the Anti-Defamation League and the European Center for Antiziganism Research for its depiction of Borat's racism and Antisemitism. The film is actually parodying such beliefs and attempting to expose acceptance of them in Borat's unwitting interview guests. In fact, Sacha Baron Cohen is himself a practicing Jew, and was later given an award by the ADL, where he made a [[SincerityMode very]] [[OOCIsSeriousBusiness moving]] speech about the continuing threat of antisemitism.
* ''Film/CSATheConfederateStatesOfAmerica'' is a mockumentary based on an alternate history where the Confederacy wins the Civil War. Said mockumentary details an America, with slavery as part of modern way life, bat-shit crazy politics dictated and decided in part by the desire and need for human chattel, and numerous fictional, parody products with extremely racist overtones. Then the mockumentary comes to its conclusion, and you find out that a lot of those ridiculous, over the top products that couldn't possibly exist, actually did, and were actually being sold for decades. The whole totalitarian plot to conquer the entire New World from top to bottom, that sounds like the alternate ending for ''Film/TheWildWildWest'', or possibly ''Anime/CodeGeass'': yeah, that was actually the plan all along, and something the Confederacy would have attempted had they won the Civil War. Suddenly, the mockumentary, while still a bit ham-handed in presentation, becomes a little more uncomfortable to watch...

* At one point, there was a popular image macro making the rounds on Facebook which made fun of fans of ''Film/FightClub'' who supposedly contradict Tyler's "don't talk about Fight Club" mantra by... well, talking about ''Fight Club.'' In the film itself, Tyler coins that saying [[ReversePsychology specifically because he knows people will disobey it,]] and thus expand his sphere of influence.

* Two movies: ''Film/JesusBro'' and ''Film/{{Let There Be Light|2017}}''. Both films are about a HollywoodAtheist who suffers a near death experience in which he sees Heaven. This causes them to go through EasyEvangelism where they lose the respect of their original community, end up getting advice from other Christians, and reconciles with old flings. Now here’s the key; one is a satire on Christian propaganda films, while the other ''is'' a Christian propaganda film. If you decide to watch both films back-to-back, it'll be hard to tell the difference.
* Much of ''Film/JojoRabbit''[='=]s advance publicity includes the TagLine "An Anti-Hate Satire", because times are such that it's become unclear if we're supposed to laugh ''at'' ThoseWackyNazis. This did not stop people from not recognizing Taika Waititi and thinking it was an actual pro-Nazi film ''because right-wing groups so frequently parody anti-hate language these days''. There were numerous tweets and comments to that effect when the film's trailer released on youtube. Once people realized that Hitler was going to be played by a Polynesian though, it became obvious this was a joke.

* After Creator/TinaFey made ''Film/MeanGirls'', she commented, with some surprise, "Adults find it funny. They are the ones who are laughing. Young people watch it like a reality show. It's much too close to their real experiences so they are not exactly guffawing." She apparently meant it to be parody, but didn't take it far enough and it was too realistic for kids to get the joke.

* Bernard de Mandeville, a Dutch physician in the 18th century, wrote a poem named ''[[http://maartens.home.xs4all.nl/philosophy/mandeville/fable_of_bees.html The Fable of Bees]]'', which was a satire to the moralist campaigns of the time. The poem caused public commotion in the time, because he wrote that the vices of the people can be useful to the society, but today is regarded as a serious economic tract and many economists complain that it's hard to interpret him. It's hard because Mandeville wrote it as a satire; he didn't have any pretension to make a scientific tract.

* ''Literature/{{Flatland}}'' is part geometric fantasy, and part satire of Victorian classism and sexism. Unfortunately, it can be hard for modern readers to tell that the author was being ''satirical.'' And apparently for some readers at the time, since in the second edition Abbot added an author's note that spelt out that the opinions of A. Square were not his own.

* There are ''still'' people who have to have it pointed out to them that ''Literature/AModestProposal'' is ''not'' intended literally. ''A Modest Proposal'' was Creator/JonathanSwift's satirical essay that suggested solving the problem of working-class children in Ireland being a drag on their parents by selling them as food to rich people. Most interpretations read it as a satire of British attitudes towards the working-class of Ireland. It created a scandal because some people didn't get the joke (Swift intended a scandal, but not like that). Modern readers who take it seriously justify their stance with Swift's misanthropy and deteriorating mental condition later in his life. At the time of the writing, however, he had no such attitudes or problems.

* The ''Literature/ViridianSaga'' is a parody of ParanormalRomance novels based on the Franchise/CthulhuMythos. It was written by WebVideo/TheNostalgiaChick and her friends, crowdsourced in a series of online videos and aided by ghostwriters. It was self-published under the alias "Serra Elinsen," who also serves as a sock-puppet for the authors to create [[DearNegativeReader online drama]]. Part of the point of the experiment is to see how people would react to it, and the authors were quite pleased when the novel caused some kerfluffle among Lovecraft fans and got some serious literary reviews.

* ''Literature/HarryPotter'' writer J.K. Rowling has had problem with WordOfGod on the matter. You see, she made the mistake of giving a random extra in the first book the same family name as Harry Potter's very own mother. The boy in question was called Mark Evans. Once Harry's mother's name was revealed (this was before ''The Half-Blood Prince'' was released), fans began speculating that Mark would become very, very relevant to the plot, and asked Rowling if that was the case. Amused by how far the rumor had gotten, she joked that he was indeed a major character and that he was, in fact, the mysterious Half-Blood Prince the upcoming book was named after. ''Everybody took it dead seriously'', to the point that someone went and created a page for Mark Evans on [[Website/{{Wikipedia}} The Other Wiki]].

* Frederick Crews wrote two satirical essays-''The Pooh Perplex'' and ''Postmodern Pooh''-mocking [[WhatDoYouMeanItsNotDidactic obsessive over-analyzing]] and FauxSymbolism in literary circles by applying that same analysis-style to ''Literature/WinnieThePooh'' and playing it with a straight face. Not only were both mistaken as being serious, but the second essay includes citations to '''actual major academics''' who unironically proposed the exact same EpilepticTrees Crews was pulling out of his ass as a joke.
* ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Report_from_Iron_Mountain The Report from Iron Mountain]]'' was a [[TheSixties Sixties]] counterculture book written by Leonard Lewin as a StealthParody of [[UsefulNotes/TheVietnamWar Vietnam-era]] military think tanks, and was convincing enough that, until it was revealed to be a hoax in 1972, even UsefulNotes/LyndonJohnson thought it was an authentic document written by a secret government panel (he reportedly "hit the roof" when he read it). Given that it fooled the President, it stands to reason that there remain people who believe that it ''was'' authentic, and that it was [[SarcasticConfession only claimed to be satirical]] as [[ParodyRetcon a means of damage control]]. It stated that war was a necessary part of the economy and served to divert collective aggression, and that society would collapse without it. Therefore, in the event of peace, they recommended that new bodies be created to emulate the economic activities of war, including {{Blood Sport}}s, the creation of new enemies to scare the people (including [[AlienInvasion alien invaders]] and environmental destruction), and [[RefugeInAudacity the reinstatement of slavery]].

* Paleontology enthusiasts tend to enjoy mocking the many low-quality dinosaur books out there, with their questionable anatomy and information decades outdated at release. A perennial favorite of such groups is an image from a kids book of "''Aeolosaurus''", supposedly an ankylosaur that could glide like a flying squirrel. The image in question is indeed from a real kid's book--that being, ''Be a Dinosaur Detective'', an activity book featuring a section which challenges the reader to pick out real dinosaurs from fake ones. Unsurprisingly, ''Aeolosaurus'' is the latter. Underlining it further, right next to it is a dinosaur supposedly named ''[[Film/TheBeastFromTwentyThousandFathoms Rhedosaurus]]''.
* Because of the way Norman Boutin responds to his detractors for ''Literature/EmpressTheresa'', it is inevitable that he will respond to almost any criticism in a highly dismissive fashion. Due to this, it is almost impossible to tell who is Norman and who is just pretending to be Norman on the [[https://empress-theresa.fandom.com/wiki/Empress_Theresa_Wiki Empress Theresa Wiki]], as the comments are filled with mass numbers of accounts all using similar names with ever increasing numbers on the end. It's at the point where a trolling attempt may go entirely over the head of any user on the site and they just assume it ''has'' to be Norman.
* According to the introduction when it was printed in ''Across the Wall'', when Creator/GarthNix posted "[[https://web.archive.org/web/20080723105042/http://www.garthnix.com/garbeliad.html My New Really Epic Fantasy Series]]" on his website he received a few emails from people who took it as a serious outline despite all the signs that it was a joke (such as the book titles that were parodies of other famous fantasy works).

* ''Series/Batman1966'' was a very popular comedy show in its day, but a surprisingly large number of modern-day viewers assume that it was meant to be a serious adventure show. This included Neil Hamilton, the portrayer of Commissioner Gordon, who would get annoyed if he saw other actors cracking up on set. Part of the reason is the show's extremely heavy use of TheComicallySerious; for all the nuttiness surrounding Batman, he always treated the events of the series with an utter straight-laced professionalism, even if it was declaring that the answer to a riddle was [[BatDeduction "A sparrow with a machinegun!"]]
* This [[https://www.polygon.com/star-wars/22929592/book-of-boba-fett-hero-vs-villain article]] by Tasha Robinson argues that Boba Fett in ''Series/TheBookOfBobaFett'' is supposed to be an incompetent villain protagonist who only succeeds by being insanely lucky and surrounded by far more competent people who can actually do all the muscle work he cannot, or will not, do himself. This explains why he is so passive and doesn't seem to have any reasons for doing the things he does, including actually wanting to be a crime lord. She also claims that Boba is not in any way a virtuous person and doesn't have any clear desire to help the people of Tatooine, only doing so because it benefits him in the moment with his greed in having the people work for or with him result in an escalation of violence. The amount of comments debating this as an actual review for the series and those who believe that this is a troll post are pretty evenly divided.

* ''Series/TheColbertReport'': Colbert plays a parody of a right-wing pundit. Many conservatives were convinced that Colbert was a real neoconservative and the show was a ''[[StealthParody parody of the way the left views the right]]''. In March 2014, Colbert drew the ire of social justice online advocate, Suey Park, who started the Website/{{Twitter}} hashtag #[=CancelColbert=], over a tweet Colbert made that was ''parodying'' the issue of Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder and [[UnfortunateImplications his launch of the Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation]]. (The tweet in question consisted entirely of the punchline and none of the setup or context). Colbert answers back [[https://youtu.be/MBPgXjkfBXM here]].

** Three notable examples are the 2008 trio of Ireland's Dustin the Turkey with "Irlande Douze Points"[[note]]A song by Dustin, a puppet turkey on Irish children's television, lamenting Ireland's lack of recent success at the contest and begging for points to a techno beat[[/note]], Estonia's Kreisisradio with "Leto svet"[[note]]A bizarre song by three Estonian comedians sung in pidgin Serbian, Finnish, and German as a parody of countries singing in random languages to score points. One bit, involving two of them [[{{Squick}} humping a piano]], was supposedly a metaphor for what these novelty acts do to music[[/note]], and Spain's Rodolfo Chikilacuatre with "Baile el Chiki-Chiki."[[note]]A parody of dance crazes performed by a Spanish comedian purposefully intending to create, in his own words, "the most ridiculous song it is possible to play." The performance played up StylisticSuck to the nth degree, particularly by having one of the female backing dancers being out-of-step and falling over trying to keep up with the rest[[/note]] While all were deliberate StylisticSuck, when they were put in the same context as actual wacky Eurovision acts with more earnest intents (such as France, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Latvia the same year), they just fell into the same traps and are often treated the same way, making appearances on "Worst Eurovision Songs" lists and usually being ranked as the worst of their year by fans, regardless of whether or not they know they're satirical.
** 2006 saw two similar acts, Iceland's Silvia Night with "Congratulations"[[note]]Silvia being a creation of an Icelandic comedian and musician mocking vain celebrities, with a purposefully over-the-top stage show and braggadocios lyrics proclaiming she was obviously going to win[[/note]] and Lithuania's [=LT=] United with "We Are the Winners" [[note]]A group, mostly made up of local news and sportscasters as opposed to musicians, proudly declaring that they were the winners of Eurovision and that people should vote for them, styled after a football chant[[/note]]. Both acts were greeted with loud jeers following their performances in the semi-final round, as fans took their attitudes at face value. It backfired for Iceland, since the song wasn't funny enough to escape Silvia's annoyingness (topped off with her actress staying in character the whole time, to the point of yelling at the Greek stage crew) and they didn't qualify. However, the viewers at home caught on to Lithuania's gag quicker than the fans in the arena: not only did Lithuania secure their first-ever qualification (to the loud consternation of the crowd), they managed their best finish ''to date'', taking sixth place in the grand final, with Ireland even awarding the song twelve points. Even Finland's Music/{{Lordi}}, the eventual winners, sang the song's chorus when they entered the winner's press conference afterwards.

* ''Series/PennAndTellerBullshit'' does this often to ridicule the topic they are covering in a particular episode, for example polling hippies on banning water (identified as the scary sounding [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dihydrogen_monoxide_hoax Dihydrogen Monoxide]]) or asking for donations to fight global warming with no proof the funds will be used legitimately. They were often shocked at how [[GoneHorriblyRight horribly right]] their "bullshit experiments" went.
* The ''Franchise/PowerRangers'' franchise works by taking action sequences from the ''Franchise/SuperSentai'' series, dubbing them and inserting their own footage with at least two Sentai: ''Series/GekisouSentaiCarranger'' (''Series/PowerRangersTurbo'') and ''Series/BakuryuuSentaiAbaranger'' (''Series/PowerRangersDinoThunder'') were total or partial parodies of the Sentai genre respectively, and made into completely serious ''Franchise/PowerRangers'' series.

* The Music/BeastieBoys claim that their "You Gotta Fight for your Right to Party" song is actually meant to mock party-goers and the whole 1980s party scene, but it's universally appreciated as a party song. This applies to much of ''Licensed To Ill,'' their debut album, in general; it was a frat boy classic at the time, but the band became pretty embarrassed about the content in later years. [=MCA=] openly denounced their previous treatment of women in their 1994 single "Sure Shot."

** Years later, Anderson also claimed that it was a parody of the concept albums by Music/{{Yes}} and Music/EmersonLakeAndPalmer however at the time ''Thick as a Brick'' was released, neither Yes nor ELP had even released one (Yes' would come two years later with "Tales From Topographic Oceans" and ELP would never release a concept album in their history) so it is quite possible that Anderson is being a bit of an UnreliableNarrator. He would finally embrace the concept in June 2012 when he released "Thick as a Brick 2." Though ELP had the album ''Tarkus'' and King Crimson made ''Lizard'' (both of them having sidelong epics) and Yes and Genesis had a penchant for long songs since the beginning. Maybe the success of ''Thick as a Brick'' helped bring it out further into the mainstream, essentially encouraging the trend of concept albums.

* Music/KatyPerry did an over-the-top spoof of HollywoodSatanism at the 2014 Grammy Awards. Unfortunately, many people missed the joke and assumed she was a real life Satanist[[note]]nevermind that it's called "Hollywood Satanism" [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin for a reason]][[/note]]. It probably didn't help that, around this same time, her "turbulent" relationship with her fundamentalist Christian parents was being extensively covered by the media.

* Music/{{Eminem}}'s act relies on a lot of CrossesTheLineTwice shock comedy, as part of him playing the character of his evil KayfabeMusic alter-ego, Slim Shady. Even now, his lyrics continue to be mistaken as a sincere expression of Eminem's desire to murder homosexuals, rape women and so on despite him extensively saying both in interviews and ''within the songs themselves'' that he's [[TheGadfly just saying this stuff to annoy people]]. This started right from when he became famous in 1999 and still is enough to force public JustJokingJustification statements out of him when, for instance, a 2009 song leaks where Slim states he sides with Music/ChrisBrown over Music/{{Rihanna}}, or he comes out with a 2018 song in which he compares his rage to bombing a Music/ArianaGrande concert.

* This trope can be inferred to be the main cause of [[Music/{{Psy}} "Gangnam Style"]] achieving the kind of popularity it received in the west. The song was written as a satire of the culture of affluence surrounding the Gangnam district in Seoul, South Korea, and the people who haplessly try to imitate it; its music video compounds this mockery by featuring Psy portraying a man pretending to be a part of the Gangnam lifestyle, among other things acting like a sandbox in a kid's playground is a luxurious beach and floundering around in another man's hot tub as if it were a private swimming pool. The infamous horse-riding dance, when put in this context, is also intended to be a jab at the association between being wealthy and owning many prized steeds. Once the video reached the west however, the low amount of Korean-speakers there and the lack of a good translation from the get-go caused most viewers to take the bizarre imagery at face-value, giving Gangnam Style a reputation as a wacky K-Pop video.

* [[https://youtu.be/EmhfdQlOiy0 "Text Me Merry Christmas"]] by StraightNoChaser is either a sincere song about lovers texting each other at Christmas because they can't be together or a satire about how vapid people who text each other constantly on their phones [[NewTechnologyIsEvil instead of interacting in more human ways]] are. The lyrics never directly wink at the audience, but both of the singers are depicted as being alone on Christmas rather than being with family which would keep them apart, and there are a few lines which are difficult to stomach. The audience is split between those who think it is satire, those who believe that it ''must'' be satire because the alternative is too depressing, and those who think that it is a sweet modern-day Christmas song about being apart at the holidays.
* Sylvan Esso's "Radio" is satirizing what artists will do to get air play on radio or make click-bait videos, but the [[https://youtu.be/effZUjig794 music video]] is itself a super-hyped up "sexy" video that without context of the song is exactly the kind of video the song is parodying, and hearing the song on a pop-radio station would be like reading a news article on a site known for fake news about how news articles are faked.

** The song "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue." Is it a genuine (if a little overheated) expression of PatrioticFervor, or an ironic glorification of the {{Eagleland}} (Flavor 2) mentality? It's really hard to tell. The song starts off sincere and heartfelt enough, but [[MoodWhiplash the abrupt shift from "melancholy" to "kickass"]] is bizarre enough to inspire at least a few self-aware chuckles. It gets even more confusing if you watch the music video, which backs up the lyrics with an intense montage of various U.S. military bombs, missiles, and fighter jets, looking almost like a Technicolor ''Film/DrStrangelove''. On balance: since most country songs don't feature so much violent or militaristic imagery, it's easy to see this as a spoof; however, the song's SugarWiki/AwesomeMusic and throat-grabbing finale make you ''want'' to take it at face value. So, all things being equal, it's all probably being played straight. According to Keith himself he originally wasn't going to record the song ''at all''; it was intended to be used only in live shows for military personnel until he was talked into recording it when they loved it. So it's almost certainly dead straight, but the context changes it. Glorifying America's military wrath ''to the military itself'' isn't quite the same as just shouting it in the street (especially when one factors in the military's distinct penchant for BlackComedy).

* Music/{{U2}}'s Zoo TV tour was intended to be an overt parody of mass media, but ironic content was so subtle that may fans believed their appreciation to be genuine. Their subsequent Pop Mart Tour upheld the theme of parody. This time, the target was consumer culture; and fans were just as baffled as they had been by Zoo TV.
* Italian britpop/indie rock band Velvet wrote a song titled "Boyband", which gently mocked the BoyBand phenomenon that was at the height of its popularity at the time (2001). The lyrics and videoclip made clear the satirical intent of the song, but most listeners took them seriously, and the song being more pop than rock didn't help. They never managed to disassociate themselves from the stigma of being "another vapid boy band" despite being active to this day and releasing several critically acclaimed albums. To the general public they're just a forgotten boy band buried among dozens of similar acts.

* [[https://youtu.be/zNEqNxwQGDo?si=-sRm1jrCjwH_Yn4s “Corazones Rojos”]] by Music/LosPrisioneros is a very ironic song that critizises the misogynistic mindset. However, lyrics such as “If you complain, The door is there, You are not allowed to give your opinion”, “We want to see you at home, Doing laundry, thinking about him, With gnarly hands, And a very juicy crotch” and “This story will continue, This order will continue, Because God wanted it that way, Because God is a man too” tend to be proudly quoted by people who didn’t detect the sarcasm.

** The AV Club posted an article about how [[http://web.archive.org/web/20110217071044/http://www.avclub.com:80/articles/glenn-beck-restores-honor-to-spiderman-turn-off-th%2C50001/ Glenn Beck loved the Spider-Man musical.]] Since both Radio/GlennBeck and ''Theatre/SpiderManTurnOffTheDark'' are polarizing topics which often spark fierce discussions, a lot of people thought this was just ''The Onion'' making stuff up, even though the AV Club is the non-satire section. It's not a joke. He really did enjoy the musical.

* [[http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport The Borowitz Report]] is a satirical [[CurrentEventsBlog news blog]] hosted on ''{{Magazine/The New Yorker}}'s'' web site, which frequently confuses people (especially their right-wing US satire).

** The newspaper finally pokes fun at the long standing leftist idea that promoting humans rights in totalitarian hellholes is the modern definition of "imperialism". [[http://www.zombietime.com/zomblog/?p=1689 Doesn't it?]]

* Right-wing British paper "The Daily Mail" printed an article about a study which demonstrated that, on average, ''right-wing voters are less intelligent and more racist'' than left-wing voters. While many chose to believe that the article was satire ([[RefugeInAudacity as no paper would be stupid enough to flat out insult their readers]]), a number of upset readers were very upset by the article, which prompted Guardian writer Creator/CharlieBrooker to deconstruct it.

* Since the end of 2013, there has been a lot of debate in the Netherlands regarding the jolly helpers of their depiction of Saint Nicholas, since these helpers [[http://www.vrijalmelo.nl/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/intocht_zwarte_pieten.jpg look like a toned down blackface]]. In early September 2014, the manufacturers of Playmobil dropped the production of figures that depict this helper. In response to this, a newspaper columnist proceeded to write a faux news article claiming that some people managed to ban a chocolate spread from a Dutch supermarket chain because they found it to symbolize Apartheid [[InsaneTrollLogic by having brown and white spread divided in 6ths in one jar, rather than being one uniform blend.]] The article states that the fictitious protesters argued that the higher ups of the store chain "wouldn't argue that it was a harmless kids spread [[GodwinsLaw if Hitler would have]] [[HitlerAteSugar had it on his sandwiches]]" and were actually taken seriously. Many people have already taken this seriously, likely by taking the article's header and its presence in a newspaper at face value without noticing it was a column.

* [[Wrestling/{{Melina}} Kyra]] was able to convince many other wrestlers who didn't know just ''how'' outlandish her [[TheGimmick gimmick]] really was that she must have been supremely arrogant and merciless in real life. Even fans couldn't decide amongst themselves if Empire Wrestling and Ultimate Pro were presenting her as a parody of the ActionHero or a straight as an arrow example of one. Ditto for Melina's AlphaBitch role in Wrestling/{{WWE}}, though Wrestling/GailKim didn't like when Melina admitted they didn't really have a feud, how legit her spat with Wrestling/CandiceMichelle was remains a mystery.

** Hendrie is ''very very good'' at doing two distinct voices, keeping them straight, and "interrupting" himself realistically, so those who tune in to the program in the middle without ever having heard of Hendrie before can be excused for not realizing he's performing both the host and guest parts. However, there's also a meta level to this; it's sometimes difficult to discern whether the callers actually believe the guests are real or whether they're just playing along (given Hendrie's vocal talents, it wouldn't be impossible that he plays some of the more ridiculous callers himself).

* ''Radio/LoZooDi105'': After having informations that the catering at the Music Festival of Sanremo offered food with an horrible taste, it spreaded a RunningGag about the Festival host Gianni Morandi being a coprophague. He probably haven't liked it, since now they have to bleep his surname every time they make a joke about it.

* ''TabletopGame/PrincessTheHopeful'' began as a parody, the orginal authors assuming that nobody would take an attempt to cross a magical girl anime with the TabletopGame/ChroniclesOfDarkness seriously. To their surprise, the concept proved surprisingly popular and, after a CerebusRetcon or two and some fleshing out, blossomed into one of the setting's most popular fangames.

* In late-1998, an [=AOL=] message board called [[MediaNotes/TheFifthGenerationOfConsoleVideoGames N64 vs. Others]] had a "writer" from Magazine/ElectronicGamingMonthly under the name of [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin "[=EGM=] Editor"]] visit the board, claiming to be famed RealLife editor Dan Hsu. His first post was a poll asking what posters believed would be the top selling game of 1998, claiming that the results would be published in the next issue of [=EGM=]. It was believable enough that many were fooled into thinking it was the real "Shoe." A couple weeks (and a few more posts) later, he revealed himself to be a fake. Yet the joke succeeded enough that, a couple months later, the ''real'' Magazine/ElectronicGamingMonthly printed a letter from the imposter in their "Login" section and responded by commending him for the prank.
* Every year, the April issue of Magazine/GameInformer prints several pages of "Game Infarcer", with PARODY clearly stated at the bottom of these pages, that include ludicrous articles and reviews. Without exception, the next month's issue's letters columns is always full of letters from either people who didn't get the joke, or who did and are playing along. It's impossible to tell the difference between the two.

* While it certainly has moments of sincerity, it is hard to count the amount of people that think ''VisualNovel/HatofulBoyfriend'' is a dead serious OtomeGame and not an AffectionateParody of them. Bonus points if it's used to show "how weird [[UsefulNotes/MisplacedNationalism Japan]] is".

* In 2014, [[https://www.deviantart.com/tanktaur/art/Pro-Demoman-Propaganda-Poster-146973630 this]] ''VideoGame/TeamFortress2'' fanart from 2009 made the news when [[https://www.pcgamer.com/team-fortress-2-poster-mistaken-for-us-propaganda-on-russian-state-television/ a Russian television program about American WWI propaganda mistook it as an actual American propaganda poster]]. Evidently the ones that picked it out didn't know a word of English, and if they did, the words "Join Team Demoman" eluded them. It's not just non-English speakers that didn't get the joke, as reportedly several inattentive history teachers also used that poster in their lectures.

* The "DK Rap" from ''VideoGame/DonkeyKong64'' was supposed to be a bit of silly fun -- an intentionally cheesy song that composer Grant Kirkhope described as "monkeys rapping about bananas and grapes." Unfortunately, because the game released during a period when many other series were adopting {{Theme Tune Rap}}s in an attempt to [[TotallyRadical stay hip with the kids]], most players at the time took it at face value.

* ''WebAnimation/DarkMatter2525'': "If Hitler Never Existed" was about how people are so fond of demonizing anyone they disagree with that a {{Utopia}} where Hitler never existed would be seen as horrific, because you wouldn't be able to call someone a Nazi in the middle of an argument. However, the video had so many comments insisting that erasing Hitler from existence wouldn't result in a utopia that [=DarkMatter2525=] had to clarify that the video was meant to be a commentary on the present, not on the past.

* Endemic at Conservapedia, a site created by right wingers as the MoralSubstitute [[http://www.conservapedia.com/Examples_of_Bias_in_Wikipedia for Wikipedia]]. As soon as it was founded, people descended on it writing completely-over-the-top articles (to the point it's now considered a FlockOfWolves), which some people took seriously. Their ''serious'' projects include [[http://www.conservapedia.com/Bible_Retranslation_Project a translation of the Bible to make it friendlier to conservative political positions.]] For instance, the whole "easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven" thing is apparently socialist, and "blessed are the meek" should really be "blessed are the God-fearing".

** Or read their page on UsefulNotes/BarackObama, or any Democratic president. But especially Obama.
-->- ''Religion: Claims to be Christian''
--->- As of May 25, 2012, says ''Religion: probably Muslim''
-->- ''On April 27, 2011 Obama officially released his long form birth certificate, which many experts have determined to be a fake and no legal body has determined its authenticity.''

* This is the basic premise of Rick Mercer's Talking to Americans where he travels around the US asking people about fake Canadian news stories. The show even got the better of some soon to be well known American politicians [[https://youtu.be/BhTZ_tgMUdo here]].

** [[http://www.cracked.com/blog/i-cant-tell-if-movies-are-being-serious-anymore This article]] is about movie trailers for 2011 summer movies - a romcom, a comedy and an action movie - that can be interpreted as parodies of their respective genres. They aren't.

* The government of Malaysia took issue with [[http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Malaysian_government_warns_citizens_about_Uncyclopedia Uncyclopedia's entry on the country]]. It's not certain if they were displeased with the site while thinking it's a for-real or a parody.
* There is a wide-spread rumor found around the web that says that TV Tropes features works pages for at least one anime series that are completely fraudulent.[[note]]There actually ''were'' some cases of people, who are either trolls or delusional, creating pages for fake works and treating them as if they were actually real, although these pages are deleted as soon as they are found out[[/note]] The "series" in question contain so many of the stereotypical anime tropes and they are described in such a fanboyish way that its impossible to actually tell these pages from the ones featuring real anime series. Presumably, this is meant as tropers engaging in SelfDeprecation. Ironically, it's also possible that this rumor is another example of this trope. This may be based on ''JustForFun/IchibanNoTempura'', a fake anime mentioned in the "Just for Fun" section, which at one point was mistaken for real and a troper added it to the (now-defunct) Sliding Scale of Anime Obscurity page.[[note]]Or possibly the troper knew it wasn't real and just added it as a joke.[[/note]] Or possibly it could be inspired by ''JustForFun/TVTropesTheWebcomic'', a "webcomic" purportedly starring JustForFun/TropeTan and being highly {{Troperiffic}}, with all the references to its nonexistence being concealed in spoiler tags. Regardless, it means that this example actually has some basis in fact.

* The now-defunct website marryourdaughter.com was a website purporting to sell teenage girls (some as young as 13) to prospective husbands (provided they submitted a "suitable" proposal). It was presented as a way for parents to earn some money, get rid of {{Bratty Teenage Daughter}}s, and as a way for [[TheFundamentalist fundamentalists]] to [[ArrangedMarriage marry daughters off]] [[Literature/TheBible Biblically]]. The website was all [[http://snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/marryourdaughter.asp a hoax]], intended to point out inconsistencies in US marriage laws regarding age of consent and such.

* In an episodes of the ''Podcast/CoxNCrendor'' podcast, Jesse Cox discusses an epiphany he had watching next episode trailers for ''Series/HellsKitchen''. He explains that he realized that they were so blatantly false compared to the episodes themselves that he's not entirely certain whether they're serious and lying or meant to spoof trailers of that nature.

* The organization D.A.R.E (the leading DrugsAreBad ,[[WesternAnimation/SouthPark m'kay?]] organization in the United States) was actually caught [[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/05/04/d-a-r-e-gets-duped-by-anti-pot-satire/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.681457768873 using a satirical article about marijuana on their website]] that made such outrageous claims such how smoking pot (which they refer to as a "third world drug") can get teenagers pregnant, the eponymous claim that people can overdose on edible marijuana candy, and that it's thanks to having a "liberal president" (D.A.R.E. is supposed to be a non-partisan organization). Unsurprisingly, they took it down without comment after the public called them out on it.

* This [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SP5cXaILDP0 video]] by Knowledge Hub describes what he deems "The Worst Possible Take on ''Franchise/StarWars''". He goes on to explain that the series works best when it is dumb fun that doesn't take itself too seriously. He criticizes ''Film/TheEmpireStrikesBack'' for trying to take the series into a serious direction when all this does is spell doom for the rest of the series, citing ''Film/ANewHope'' and ''Film/ReturnOfTheJedi'' as films that he can enjoy because they are silly fun with only occasional serious moments without being the DarkerAndEdgier movie like Empire. He isn't going so far as to claim the prequels are legitamately good films but he does claim that Jar Jar is the best aspect of ''Film/ThePhantomMenace'' as just listening to him is CrossingTheLineTwice. He criticizes Disney being corporate and cynical, especially Abrams, while defending Rian Johnson for making a silly, fun and dumb movie in the form of ''Film/TheLastJedi''. However, the crowning achievement is when he says that the infamous "Holiday Special" is his favorite aspect of wider Star Wars. The commenters on the video are equally divided in citing this as brutal satire, an elaborate shitpost or an unfiltered cynical evaluation of how Star Wars is overhyped and really nothing more than a wacky adventure series for kids.

* [[https://www.dailydot.com/irl/conservatives-fake-nintendo-incest-picture-mario-luigi/ Conservative politicians were disgusted]] at Creator/{{Nintendo}} for promoting incest after they saw a 2019 Pride Month Tweet containing a picture of [[Franchise/SuperMarioBros Mario and Luigi]] as a gay couple kissing. They missed that the account who made the post was ''not'' the official Nintendo account, but rather a parody account.

* A viral marketing ploy for the movie ''Hell's Half Acre'' created the [[https://youtu.be/YXG_XaORJbE WUCP]], an organization that represents the WhatDoYouMeanItsNotForKids mentality to the most logical extreme by acting shocked when they see the movie trailer and are appalled that this is being passed off as children entertainment and call for it to be banned. It's so over the top that no one would believe it was real, right? Well, as a look at the comments will point out, many people took it seriously. On a plus side, the movie producers did get quite a bit of free publicity.
* The Bonsai Kitten web site, which admittedly was a very sick joke, was a joke nevertheless (close inspection of several of the photographs revealed that they were obviously posed, such as a kitten supposedly "in" a bottle being actually behind it). Still, the site drew tons of protests, including several chain letters, from those who failed to grasp the parody.

* The [=ManBeef=] web site garnered similar reaction. The joke was the site claimed to sell human meat and provide recipes for cooking human meat. The site had nowhere to actually begin human meat transactions, just in case someone was crazy enough to try (and there were a few).

* A group parodying the Tea Party released videos advocating a boycott of Disney's ''WesternAnimation/{{Aladdin}}'' on the grounds that it was Islamic propaganda. Many were confused as to whether the videos were serious or not, but in this case the fact that it was believable as a Tea Party position ''was'' part of the point of the parody.

* Conservative former Virginia state senator Steve Martin (not [[Creator/SteveMartin that one]]) made a Facebook post in which opposed abortion, calling it wrong even if "the child's host (some refer to them as mothers) wants to kill it". This caused outrage for apparently dehumanizing pregnant women as mere "hosts" rather than human beings in their own right. His actual intention was to sarcastically use the same language that a few pro-choicers have used, whereby an embryo/fetus should be considered a parasite and the mother the host. But this line of pro-choice argument is sufficiently obscure, and Martin's wording sufficiently awkward (the tone switches mid-sentence from "what I really believe" to "what the other side believes"), that it came across differently.

* [[http://jmantime-is-here.deviantart.com/ Jmantime]] (some images and language NSFW) is most certainly a parody of bad Deviantart "artists", what with the insane pairings of anime characters/Western characters/mascots and celebrities, the use of topical and/or controversial themes (including ISIS-chan and Hetalia {{O|riginalCharacter}}Cs), the poor spellings (including the forced catchphrase "Oh Fuck Muffin's") and the use of an edgy Sonic recolor as an avatar. On his Tumblr he states to be half-serious and half-parody, for what it's worth.

** Some cite the interview of Steven by Creator/DanielTosh on his tv show Series/{{Tosh0}} as definitive proof that the video was fake. The episode involves Tosh [[PerpSweating interrogating]] Steven, with the help of Creator/MichaelWinslow (You know, [[AdamWesting that guy who makes the funny noises]]), eventually using a [[LieDetector polygraph machine]], and finally resorting to a threat to [[LaserGuidedKarma shove a remote up his butt if he doesn't tell the truth]]. This is a [[RuleOfFunny comedy show]], and it's not known what occurred back stage.

* A few days before the 2014 Isla Vista Massacre, the perpetrator, Elliot Rodger, posted a video espousing his beliefs and plans for "revenge." The video ended up being posted to reddit's r/cringe subreddit, where commenters had a hard time telling whether he genuinely wanted to kill people or was just a massive troll.
* [=YouTube=] user 1stkirbyever ran into this while simultaneously [[https://youtu.be/bLb25V5lqaE demonstrating a glitch]] in the ''VideoGame/SonicGenerations'' demo and parodying Sonic's infamously UnpleasableFanbase. After seeing that some people missed the joke, he add a disclaimer to [[https://youtu.be/0jGSrNbM2Wc the sequel]] stating, in large, bold letters, "I AM NOT SERIOUS." ''There were still people who missed the joke, even with the disclaimer.'' You can tell he's given up on the parody part with [[https://youtu.be/hZ_QHoELNVU the third installment]].
* [[https://youtu.be/GcpsqiqXBcw Islamic State of Donbass and Lugant]], a parody of jihad videos by pro-Russian insurgents in eastern Ukraine, complete with ''nasheed'' (Islamic acapella chants) & their flag modified to include Islamist symbolism. Ukrainian & other commenters mistake them as an actual Islamist terrorists, while the Russians are joking about their [[UsefulNotes/OrthodoxChristianity Orthodox]] [[ChurchMilitant "jihad"]]. There are Muslim volunteers fighting in the pro-Russian side, but '''NONE''' of them are radical Islamists related with the jihadist movements.

** After uploading a video of Jesse shooting his father dead, and a follow-up video showing him moving out of the country in a desperate attempt to escape his crime, he cries on camera admitting that he made a mistake that can never be forgiven. Immediately after he finishes, he gets up, walks out of the room, and points the camera at the door, showing that his dad is alive and well, his mom is nearby, and he is in his parents bedroom and ''not'' a hotel room like the video leads you to believe. Following this, Jesse came forth admitting that the entire Psycho series was indeed fake, and proceeded to upload bloopers and discussions about the show, even showing him giving his parents multi-thousand dollar checks for their help in the series. Jesse would also admit that, due to the lines of the show blurring from reality, he had actually been swatted before, and had the police called on his home multiple times by concerned or enraged fans. At one point, the police had even told him that he had to stop uploading the videos, which he responded that the show was nearing completion shortly. He continues uploading as he has before with new videos and series.

* The [[NonIndicativeName exceedingly ironically named]] [=YouTube=] channel No Bullshit tends to put out videos that are so stupid, repugnant, and/or downright ''ridiculous'' (in one, he insults someone by call them a [[BigStupidDooDooHead cuckoo wack-a-do]]) people often think he is a parody. As far as anyone can tell, he's serious.

* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcWu0tsiZM Modern Educayshun]] by [[https://www.youtube.com/c/neelk/featured Neel Kolhatkar]] is meant to be a mockery of social media culture affecting higher education, meant to joke about how everyone can easily get offended over anything while anything worth learning is silenced underneath a barrage of Political Correctness. This came out in ''2015''. Jump forward to year 2020 and the comments section is filled with remarks about how true this is in real life, stating that it hits too close to home.

* The promotional video for ''Advertising/{{Cryptoland}}'', a plan by cryptocurrency enthusiasts to build a community on an Fijian island, was widely mocked once it was discovered by the internet at large due to its crude 3D animation, creepy and offputting mascot character, dialogue and location names consisting mostly of cringeworthy crypto in-jokes, inexplicable musical numbers, and the concept alone inviting unflattering comparisons to the disastrous [[Horrible/MusicFestivals Fyre Festival]]. Because of all this, the whole thing can come off like a scathing StealthParody of the culture surrounding crypto, with [[https://thenextweb.com/news/welcome-to-cryptoland-real-island-cryptocurrency-fans-analysis an article on the subject]] calling it "closer to a crypto satire than a sales pitch". However, whether the project is genuine or just a scam, it's clear the video wasn't meant to be seen as a joke, as evidenced by the fact the creators took it down from their [=YouTube=] channel in response to the mockery, and started issuing legal threats in an effort to silence their critics.

* ''WesternAnimation/TheFairlyOddParents'': The show's 10th season has introduced yet ''[[CousinOliver another character]]'', named Chloe, who was written to be a ParodySue as she's blatantly, unrealistically perfect in many ways from knowing 12 languages to having a Nobel Prize. Despite this, she was still given the rights to Timmy's fairies half the time. It was later revealed that she was [[DeconstructedTrope perfect to a fault]] as she often tried so hard to make everything great that she ended up overcompensating and ruining everything instead which led to people ostracizing her. Unfortunately, her sue qualities got played so straight that many people in the show's fandom mistook her for an outright CanonSue and decried her inclusion and how she was able to get fairies despite being "perfect". Later episodes would downplay her sue qualities and show more of her flaws, but by then the damage was done, and the 10th season ended up being its last.

** [[Recap/TheSimpsonsS8E24TheSimpsonsSpinOffShowcase "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase"]] satirized the trend of TV networks trying to make spinoffs and successor series that are frequently inferior to the original show (this episode predated ''WesternAnimation/{{Futurama}}'' and Creator/SethMacFarlane's animated shows), with all three segments deliberately badly scripted, bland and cheesy. However, some fans mistook the StylisticSuck for actual bad writing. Creator/MattGroening was worried that fans would react that way. This happened mostly due two reasons:

* When ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'' released [[https://derpibooru.org/591492 a teaser image]] for a then-upcoming episode ("Testing Testing 1, 2, 3") featuring Pinkie Pie as a rapper, more than a few people assumed that the show was charging headlong into TotallyRadical territory. Fortunately, when the episode actually aired, it quickly became clear that the rap was [[StylisticSuck intentionally ridiculous]], as it was a ''parody'' of TotallyRadical edutainment from the 90's. In particular, it's a rather direct spoof of the rap segment from the infamous [[https://youtu.be/up863eQKGUI Don't Copy That Floppy]] PSA.

* Creator/SalvadorDali once sent a telegram for Romania's dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, for his adoption of a scepter as part of his regalia. Dalí's intent was to mock him, but Ceauşescu, who had one of the biggest personality cults ever, took it seriously, and the text was published in the Party's newspaper. When he ''did'' find out it was a joke, he fired the editor who published it. Never mind that he was the one who ordered it to be published.

* A little known example with Erwin Schrödinger. His infamous UsefulNotes/SchrodingersCat thought experiment was actually made by him as an absurd scenario to point out the flaw with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which claimed that two systems (such as two subatomic particles) which interacted but then separated would each have to be in a non-definite state until observed. Schrödinger thought this was silly and so came up with a scenario so absurd that it would show the flaws in the Copenhagen interpretation. His scenario was that if you locked a cat in a box with a gas vial of poison that would be smashed upon the decay of a radioactive isotope, then left the box closed and unobserved for a half-life of the isotope, the isotope would be in a superposition of being (i.e. "both or neither") decayed and not decayed, the gas consequently in a superposition of being released and not released, and the cat in a superposition of being both alive and dead. Many laypeople today know Schrödinger's name only from this thought experiment, and assume that he believed (or perhaps even "proved") that quantum mechanics meant that you could have a cat simultaneously alive and dead, when in fact this was intended as an absurd implication of an interpretation of quantum mechanics that Schrödinger wished to discredit. Moreover, a few experiments have placed particles or quantum-scale systems in situations were they do genuinely appear to be in two states simultaneously.

** ''Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity'' [[http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal by Alan Sokal.]] Alan Sokal, a physicist who was [[HardOnSoftScience severely annoyed]] at scientifically-illiterate deconstructionist philosophers trying to work quantum physics into their philosophy, submitted a paper to the journal ''Social Text'' which declared "quantum gravity"--and ultimately reality itself--[[ClapYourHandsIfYouBelieve to be a social construct]], and that somehow this was beneficial for left-wing politics. ''Social Text'' accepted it. No peer review, no attempt to verify the scientific 'facts'. Right after printing it he notified them it was a [[InsaneTrollLogic logically inconsistent rambling]] as bad as he could write without [[MushroomSamba using mushrooms]]. Oops. ''Social Text'' was annoyed. According to the journal editors, they didn't agree with his argument and thought the paper was badly written, but at no point had it occurred to them that it wasn't a sincere effort. Sokal concluded that they had printed his paper because it came from a respected academic and [[BiasSteamroller flattered their political views]].

* In 1985 MIT pranksters managed to get a sculpture included in an exhibition at MIT's List Visual Art Center. Titled "No Knife", it consisted of an overturned wastebasket on which was a dining hall tray, plate, bowl, glass, fork and two spoons. It was accompanied by an artist's statement describing it as "a study in mixed media earth tones", and going on to praise and interpret it ("The casual formalism of the place setting draws upon our common internal instincts of existential persistence to unify us with the greater consciousness of human bondage") in a parody of the style of art criticism. It took the gallery staff several hours to discover it was not actually part of the exhibition.

* In a strange case, creationist speaker Kent Hovind earned the P.T. Barnum "One Born Every Minute" Award when he incorporated information of the finding of man and dinosaur fossils co-existing and the government cover-up of this discovery, from a website into his lectures as evidence against evolution. In reality, the website was a fake one ([[http://www.nmsr.org/Archive.html and somewhat conspicuously so]]) that the New Mexicans for Science and Reason (NMSR) had set up as an April Fool's Day prank.

* There's a minor political party in Russia called "Communists of St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast" (CPLO), that is best known for their public appeals, written in an over-the-top style of mock Soviet propaganda. They sent a hate mail to Steven Spielberg over ''Film/IndianaJonesAndTheKingdomOfTheCrystalSkull'', and accused ''Avatar'' of ripping off from Creator/StrugatskyBrothers. Recently, they claimed that European probe Philae is a 'space pirate' and should pay for landing on a 'Soviet' Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet. Their philippics have been picked up by media and taken too seriously, so that the ''real'' Communist Party had to remind they have nothing to do with that. There's still a debate is CPLO parodying Communists JustForFun, as an advertisement strategy, or if they're really nuts (which is unlikely).

* At the First West Coast Computer Faire, Apple engineer Steve Wozniak had made several gag brochures for a successor to the MITS Altair called the "Zaltair." The ad copy was filled with absurd claims, like having 18 expansion card slots, a new "BAZIC" programming language that could be rewritten by the user, and a case that will "add to the decor of any living room." People bombarded the MITS stand with questions about the new model, and it wasn't until late in the day that anyone caught on to the joke. Today, these brochures are highly sought-after collector's items. What made it plausible was Woz's unorthodox sense of humor and that everything listed there ''did'' really exist at that time — the fictional computer just had little to do with those features. Except maybe 18 expansion slots — this was how many slots were in the full-feature ''Altair 8800'' MB, though not all of them could be used for expansion.[[note]]MITS' S-100 bus was a passive backplane, and at least three to four slots were taken up by the [[UsefulNotes/CentralProcessingUnit CPU]] board, [[UsefulNotes/RandomAccessMemory memory]] board, I/O board etc.[[/note]] The first UsefulNotes/ProgrammingLanguage that could be rewritten on-the-fly[[note]]John [=McCarthy=]'s Lisp[[/note]] was actually invented [[OlderThanTheythink back in '55]], but was virtually unknown in the microcomputer world, and a case might be successfully built that the case that will "add to the decor of any living room" was present in Woz's own work — the fair was a venue where the Platform/AppleII was first unveiled, and it was the first fruit of Steve Jobs' famous "computer as appliance" philosophy.

* After years of secrecy, English [[CropCircles crop circle]] makers Doug Bower and Dave Chorley decided to fess up to their pranks in 1991, only to find many UFO-believers deciding that, although the circles were man-made, the two must have been possessed by aliens who had [[InsaneTrollLogic made the circles through them]]. As Podcast/{{Skeptoid}} sums up in an episode on crop circles:

* Russian film-maker Anton Ilmyanov was disconcerted to see videos showing UFO's and putative "sky-beasts" living in Earth's upper atmosphere appearing on ufology websites as proof positive that not only UFO's but the fabled "sky beasts" existed. The reason for his disconcertment was simple: he had created the videos himself as educational exercises, demonstrating how ridiculously easy it is to fake these things with modern technology. Even though he had clearly labelled his work as deliberate fakes that should not be taken as real, and the whole point of making them had been to demonstrate how such things can be faked, they had still ended up with the UFO-nuts anyway. Even today they are still out there, with some commentators explaining that Ilmanyov has clearly been "got at" by Them and forced to denounce the films... see Magazine/ForteanTimes, [=FT329=], July 2015)
* Amid 2020's worldwide debate over systemic racism and removing monuments to historical figures who perpetuated bigotry, someone spray-painted [[USefulNotes/{{Denmark}} Copenhagen's]] landmark statue of Literature/TheLittleMermaid with the words "RACIST FISH". Which is a bit confusing, since even the most nitpicky scholar would have trouble labeling either the mermaid herself or the story she's from "racist". Nobody knows whether it was sincere-but-misguided activists, drunk pranksters, people trying to satirize the whole statue debate by painting a nonsensical slogan on an innocent marker...

* In response to [[https://www.cnet.com/culture/m-ms-spokescandies-controversy-how-things-got-so-sticky M&M's rebranding themselves as Ma&Ya's for the Super Bowl,]] A&M made a [[https://twitter.com/awrestaurants/status/1617975902004019231 satirical post]] announcing that their mascot Rooty was now wearing pants, because not wearing pants could be polarizing. [[https://www.avclub.com/a-w-m-ms-fox-news-rooty-the-great-root-bear-1850035144 Cue Fox News dedicating a segment to Rooty's change,]] decrying that "cancel culture has gone too far".
* Owing to the ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Thunder#Documents_leaks numerous]]'' leaks of classified or otherwise restricted documents, someone posted a [[https://web.archive.org/web/20230124234141/https://old.reddit.com/r/Warthunder/comments/10j1hqr/congrats_guys_we_did_it/ joke]] about a prospective Raytheon (a large American defense contractor) employee being asked if they played ''VideoGame/WarThunder''. As a result, many people ''truly'' believed that playing ''VideoGame/WarThunder'' was a genuine impediment to obtaining a security clearance or working at a defense contractor. However, Raytheon has [[https://web.archive.org/web/20230124193915/https://videogames.si.com/news/war-thunder-national-security-risk denied]] asking such, stating, "We only look at a person’s education, employment and criminal history when hiring. We’ve never looked into a person’s video game habits and I can’t imagine a case in which we’d have a concern with any game."

* It's hard to tell how many people really believe in the idea that the MandelaEffect, the real phenomenon of mass false memories, happens because the "wrong" version you remember was actually true until reality changed somehow. Maay of the posts on the Mandela Effect [[Website/{{Reddit}} subreddit]] feel like {{troll}}ing, with people either pretending to be really dense (with obviously contrived misspellings of celebrity names, or thinking that well-known, very much alive celebrities really died years ago), or coming up with overly complex, nonsensical explanations of what might be causing the effect (Parallel universes colliding! Time travelers deliberately messing with things!), all seemingly to goof around with the apparent small handful of posters who feel it's SeriousBusiness.

** Really, a lot of The Offspring's material is open to this. They write a lot of satirical songs, though without listening carefully to the lyrics, it can be hard to tell what's meant to be taken seriously and what isn't.

* In late-1998, an [=AOL=] message board called [[UsefulNotes/TheFifthGenerationOfConsoleVideoGames N64 vs. Others]] had a "writer" from Magazine/ElectronicGamingMonthly under the name of [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin "[=EGM=] Editor"]] visit the board, claiming to be famed RealLife editor Dan Hsu. His first post was a poll asking what posters believed would be the top selling game of 1998, claiming that the results would be published in the next issue of [=EGM=]. It was believable enough that many were fooled into thinking it was the real "Shoe." A couple weeks (and a few more posts) later, he revealed himself to be a fake. Yet the joke succeeded enough that, a couple months later, the ''real'' Magazine/ElectronicGamingMonthly printed a letter from the imposter in their "Login" section and responded by commending him for the prank.

* ''WebVideo/ThirdRateGamer'', a StylisticSuck parody of {{Caustic Critic}}s (''WebVideo/TheIrateGamer'' in particular) is often mistaken for a legitimate, awful reviewer. His UsefulNotes/NintendoDS "review" begins with a disclaimer that says that the show is a parody, but if you read the comments to some of his other videos, you can still find people confusing him with an actual reviewer.

* At the First West Coast Computer Faire, Apple engineer Steve Wozniak had made several gag brochures for a successor to the MITS Altair called the "Zaltair." The ad copy was filled with absurd claims, like having 18 expansion card slots, a new "BAZIC" programming language that could be rewritten by the user, and a case that will "add to the decor of any living room." People bombarded the MITS stand with questions about the new model, and it wasn't until late in the day that anyone caught on to the joke. Today, these brochures are highly sought-after collector's items. What made it plausible was Woz's unorthodox sense of humor and that everything listed there ''did'' really exist at that time — the fictional computer just had little to do with those features. Except maybe 18 expansion slots — this was how many slots were in the full-feature ''Altair 8800'' MB, though not all of them could be used for expansion.[[note]]MITS' S-100 bus was a passive backplane, and at least three to four slots were taken up by the [[UsefulNotes/CentralProcessingUnit CPU]] board, [[UsefulNotes/RandomAccessMemory memory]] board, I/O board etc.[[/note]] The first UsefulNotes/ProgrammingLanguage that could be rewritten on-the-fly[[note]]John [=McCarthy=]'s Lisp[[/note]] was actually invented [[OlderThanTheythink back in '55]], but was virtually unknown in the microcomputer world, and a case might be successfully built that the case that will "add to the decor of any living room" was present in Woz's own work — the fair was a venue where the UsefulNotes/AppleII was first unveiled, and it was the first fruit of Steve Jobs' famous "computer as appliance" philosophy.

* In ''Film/HaroldAndKumarGoToGuantanamoBay'', the main villain is a racist, paranoid DHS agent who is a parody of UsefulNotes/TheWarOnTerror-era jingoism and militarism. At one point he meets Creator/NeilPatrickHarris and tells him that he was inspired to join the security apparatus because of ''Film/StarshipTroopers'', not understanding that the movie was explicitly a satire of people like him. Of course if he's read [[Literature/StarshipTroopers the book]], that would be a different story...