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alt title(s): Poes Law "Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article."
—Nathan Poe
Or, to generalize:
"Parodies of Fundamentalism are likely to be mistaken for real Fundamentalism and may become real. Real Fundamentalism will look like a parody to those who are unfamiliar with it.
This is because both parodies and fundamentalism are extreme.
An over-the-top fundamentalist rant can be mistaken for a parody or Straw Man by moderate conservatives or liberals; an intentional elaborate parody can be actively supported by hardcore fundamentalists.
According to RationalWiki , Poe's Law was formulated by Nathan Poe referring to the Flame Wars on Christian forums where Creationism vs. Evolution was discussed. Many users posted parody comments, which were followed by both angry replies and supportive ones.
While Poe's Law refers mostly to religion, it can also apply to any debate where controversy runs high and at least one position is particularly extreme, such as the infamous North Korean Twitter feed that got mistaken for the real thing.
It can also refer to the idea (supported by a different Poe) that a poem should be short enough that the reader's mind does not wander, but that's something else entirely.
See Stealth Parody, which this law tends to undermine. Parody Retcons attempt to appeal to this. Compare Does Not Understand Sarcasm.
Examples:
- Jack Chick falls squarely into this.
- To clarify, Jack Chick maintains that his work is totally sincere and in no way a parody; but it is so over the top and warped that many people believe he is kidding, often even after learning of his fervent declarations to the contrary. And since there is the (slight) possibility that it is a joke, that would make the vitriolic debates over the things he says also fit squarely into this.
- Chick himself also seems to be a victim of this judging from this advertisement (seriously, "The Old Ones"?), but given the fact that he believes that any kind of research is planted by Satan, one can pretty much spin an over the top tale and sell it to Chick publications.
- Well that "Old Ones" thing is pretty easy to figure out: the guy had watched way too much Buffy The Vampire Slayer when he went crazy.
- The site Fundies Say The Darndest Things often has a hard time telling which quotes are real and which are made by trolls on Christian Forums.
- It also has sister projects, Racists Say The Darndest Things, and Conspiracy Theorists Say The Darndest Things
- This comic is either the real deal, or a satire on conservatives' views of liberals.
- Judging by the author's biography, probably the real thing. Both sides see the other as beyond parody in the current US political situation...
- Rapture Ready Forums (then again, it's the #1 source for fstdt.net), good luck discerning.
- Blog AntiSpore fooled many gamers, despite some very obvious notes on the blog's "Real About Page", like the following:
- The Onion, at least when writing articles about devil-worship in Dungeons And Dragons.
- Inverted by The Colbert Report, where the negativity toward right-wing pundits is so extreme that many conservatives are convinced it's a parody of the way the left views the right *
cf. Ohio State University study "The Irony of Satire: Political Ideology and the Motivation to See What You Want to See in The Colbert Report" .
- There's also a false, but pervasive myth that he was mistaken for a real conservative pundit by members of the Bush administration when he was invited to the 2006 correspondents' dinner; the dinner was in large part a traditional roast of the President, and they knew exactly who he was, although they may not have expected him to be quite so harsh.
- Edward Current of You Tube fame is the posterboy of this. He pretends to be a Christian and uses actual fundamentalist arguments that are generally absurd. Current continues to be mistaken for a Christian by Christians and atheists alike. Apparently, no one checks the tags. Example
- Also from Youtube: Jesusophile. All of his arguments are based on logical fallacies. He claims that the theory of evolution says that giraffes decided to have longer necks, and that humans couldn't possible have evolved from apes because apes are stronger than humans and evolution always makes things stronger and better. He is often mistaken for a real fundamentalist.
- Pretty much the entire Youtube Atheist and Christian communities fall victim to this. Christians often get accused of being fake, Atheists who satirize them often get mistaken for the real thing. It's particularly funny when the most blatant, ridiculous satire actually gets praise from a Christian.
- Of course, the praise itself may be a joke from a non-fundamentalist...
- Fictional non-religious example (finally!), from Erasure: An intellectual African-American author, sick and tired of his philosophical books being passed over for publication because they're not suitably "Black," writes a way, way over the top parody of thuggish ghetto-chic blacksploitation called My Paffology and has his agent send it out as a protest. Random House accepts the book at face value as a fierce portrayal of the Black experience and pays six hundred grand for it. The book, now renamed Fuck, goes on to win the National Book award.
- Salvador Dali once sent a telegram for Romania's communist dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu, for his adoption of a scepter as part of his regalia. Dali's intent was to mock him, but Ceaucescu, who had one of the biggest personality cults ever, took it seriously, and the text was published in the Party's newspaper.
- MTV Spain made a parody of Christian pop with a ridiculous song called Amo a Laura pero esperaré hasta el matrimonio (I love Laura but I'll wait until we're married). Many people didn't get that it was a joke until it was explicitly stated in the news.
- Several people have mistaken Landover Baptist for a real church.
- On the original site, the only definitive tell was the "ex-Catholic bishop" who could still excommunicate you, so you'd be able to get a better conversion story to witness with.
- Same for OBJECTIVE: Ministries.
- Endemic at Conservapedia, a site created by right wingers upset that Wikipedia treated evolution as true, and otherwise did not support their fundamentalist Christian agenda. As soon as it was founded, people descended on it writing completely-over-the-top articles, which some people took seriously. Their serious projects include a translation of the Bible into Conservative language. (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". Not kidding. Read the page.)
- Here's a particularly funny example of (apparent) stealth-parody vandalism.
- Or read their page on Obama, or any Democratic president of the 20th century. But especially Obama.
- The Conservapedia article on George W. Bush once said that he was "one of the greatest presidents in American history", that he was "successfully able to salvage the Hurricane Katrina rescue effort after it was sabotaged by a Democratic/Islamo-Fascist conspiracy" and that his unpopularity is entirely due to him being forced by the Democratic Congress to push through Bailout packages.
- Many of the best parodies on Conservapedia result not from the founder's conservatism but his Americamania: one of the reasons he left Wikipedia was because they allowed that nasty inferior subhuman scum-of-the-earth Commonwealth spelling in articles written by residents of Commonwealth countries. Cue hundreds of articles supporting the "America is the only country in the world" mentality.
- The root of the issue is that the site's proprietor, Andy Schlafly, keeps the site under very tight control. The number of satirists has led him to become ever more paranoid and ban-happy... the result being that only the parodists remain◊, driving him ever-deeper into his mad spiral of paranoid bannings.
- This evolved into meta-humor once this entry made its way on there - particularly with this laughable assertion "Clearly, the cause of the mistake is not that the genuine article is no better than a mockery; rather, the cause of the mistake is that some people lack the critical thinking skills and/or experience to differentiate the two."
- Roger Ebert posted an article giving a statement of creationist beliefs, with the intention of making a point about people's inability to recognise irony. While many people did see the satire, a significant number of readers either thought he was being serious or assumed the site had been hacked. PZ Myers criticised the article, pointing out that when there are so many people making the same claims without irony, the joke becomes indetectable to anyone who doesn't already know Ebert's stance on the issue.
- Hell, let's go nuts: there are still people who have to have it pointed out to them that A Modest Proposal is not intended literally. "A Modest Proposal" was Jonathan Swift's satirical essay that suggested solving the problem of working-class children in Ireland being a drag on their parents by selling them for food to rich people. It's hilarious, seriously. But it created a scandal because people didn't get the joke.
- Just for the record, there are very few things funnier than being in the middle of an entire classroom full of high school students who don't get the joke, and conspiring with the teacher to egg them on.
- Richard Dawkins has been known to express surprise upon learning that Ann Coulter was not a spoof created by the Onion.
- Shelley the Republican has sparked a lot of debate on whether it is serious or not.
- Popehat closed their fake Twitter account for North Korea's propaganda ministry after legitimate news agencies started picking up stories from it.
- YouLoveMolly of Youtube fame falls into this, and many don't know which side she falls into. Of particular notice is this video.
- The "Net Authority", with its infamous policy against "bestiality, including interracial relationships".
- The Church of Euthanasia, which has (had?) tips for gutting and cleaning humans. People took it seriously, even after the "I Like to Watch" video, which cuts 9/11 footage with porn. The owner of a site is a left-wing vegan frustrated with the government, unsurprisingly.
- I think they even fooled Cracked.com.
- In Religulous, Bill Maher disguises himself and starts preaching the actual tenets of Scientology on a park, naturally, most people laugh at him and call him crazy, unaware that those were Scientologists' real beliefs.
- Would they have laughed any less if they knew?
- The world of High Art is also very much like this; Bill Watterson and Dave Barry have gotten in some particularly good knocks.
- The Sokal Affair: not quite intended as humor, but sufficiently over-the-top to pass peer review.
- This is a sad one. Alan Sokal, a physicist who was 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, to be a social construct. Social Text accepted it; on the day it was printed, Sokal declared it a hoax. Social Text was annoyed; they thought that the paper had merit, and, according to them, while the editors themselves didn't think reality was a social construct, they thought that Sokal thought it was! What makes this really sad? One of the papers linked to the wikipedia article suggests that some physicists do consider reality to be a social construct. After all, reality in quantum physics is dependent on observers... Which is, of course, exactly where the "scientifically illiterate" part kicks in, because this does not mean what most people take it to mean (it has something to do with the unavoidable effects of physical measuring methods on particles smaller than a single photon; it does not mean that things happen because you look at them.)
- When Internet Infidels Discussion Board decided to start a contest of making parodies of the creationist organization 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 an example: original◊ and parody◊.
- There is an urban legend where the Muslim fundamentalists allow their women to walk in front of them despite the Qur'an. The reason? Qur'an was written before the invention of the landmine. The urban legend presents it as true, but (at least in Russia) it's often told as a joke with no claims for being real.
- To this day there's a significant debate, in light of his other writings, as to whether Machiavelli intended The Prince, by far his most famous work, as a satire or not.
- The Marquis de Sade was a satirist who's most famous works (Juliette and Justine) were basically meant to say "Look at this! Look at this! You fuckers just let this shit happen all around you!" The world now remembers him only as the originator of sadism.
- Amusingly enough, after the French revolution De Sade renounced his title and became an official of the revolutionary government... until he resigned in protest against the revolution's cruel acts.
- Inversion: Kirk Cameron "proves" creationism with a banana. If someone who believed in evolution had done this, it would have been called a very funny parody.
- That kind of banana was created, by humans. One of the most memorable parodies simply ran through the same criteria he sets to show a banana is created, only with a pineapple in hand.
- In some kind of weird inversion, Kirk's ministry now treats the original as if it was a parody in the first place, playing the rant for laughs.
- Performance artists The Yes-Men have made a career out of this, or at least they did during the Bush administration. One of their projects included passing out pamphlets called "Yes Bush Can!" with a checklist of the Bill of Rights, urging people (these were handed out at Republican rallies) to check off 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.
- If you read the guest book entries for the anti-abortion parody site, Save the Preconceived Babies - many are from enraged people who believed that the site owner really was an over-the-top pro-lifer. The same was true of a sister site that used to exist, Cryin 4 My Angel.
- It can be quite difficult to tell whether some of the entries on the blog "spEak You're bRanes", which highlights particularly wrong-headed, absurd and frothing responses to news articles on sites such as the BBC's "Have Your Say" website, are genuine examples of people acting like wallies on the Internet or whether they're particularly subtle parodies.
- Whitehouse.org during the Bush era. It also spawned some spinoffs.
- This became a lot less funny when Bush heard about it and declared that there ought to be more limits on free speech. They couldn't possibly top that.
- Matt Harding of Where The Hell Is Matt fame did a joke video claiming that his Where The Hell Is Matt videos were just an elaborate hoax, involving robot backup dancers and other such absurdities. Soon news articles around the Internet were lambasting Matt for this terrible deception, to the point where he had to make a public announcement that the hoax was a hoax.
- There were "scientific" papers and conferences that swallowed and processed nonsensical, but imitating their style and language papers, only to discover they were punned.
- Social Text: published Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity by Alan Sokal. After printing it they were notified that he sent them logically inconsistent text as close to Mushroom Samba as he could make it without using real mushrooms. Oops.
- WMSCI 2005: accepted an article Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy. The only value it has for the computer science is the fact that this garbage wasn't even written by human, but by pseudorandom text generator. Then these pranksters went to the conference, held a "technical" session and did read a few more randomly generated speeches with straight faces. All is there — along with Open Source text generator.
- Columnist Andrew Sullivan's bizarre theories about Sarah Palin's youngest child are either a very clever parody of liberal thought or a symptom of mental illness.
- This insane "wiki" is possibly closest to being beyond Poe's law since it is simply impossible that humanity would produce such with a serious intent and it's too extreme to even work as a parody.
- No one knows for certain whether or not the infamous Harry Potter fanfic My Immortal is a Troll Fic. It was posted with at least the pretense of seriousness, but it includes every Harry Potter fanfic cliché taken to ridiculous levels, spelling and grammar so bad that the author can't seem to spell her own lead character's name right and a plot that becomes increasingly nonsensical and even surreal. But there actually is fanfiction out there which is just about that bad, so... yeah.
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