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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. 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.
- 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
- Also its hard to tell if the snarkers are being sarcastic or are acutaly fundies themselves too.
- And sometimes the snarkers themselves go pretty fundie in their fundie-bashing.
- Pay Evil Unto Evil.
- Not to mention the rabid trolling, such as the infamous user "The Real American Cowboy"
- Rapture Ready Forums (then again, it's the #1 source for fstdt.net), good luck discerning.
- Blog AntiSpore fooled many gamers, few noticed the subtle note making reference to this law which settled its status as a parody:
- The Onion.
- The Colbert Report, occasionally.
- "Occasionally", in this context, includes "including that time he was invited to speak to George W. Bush."
- There's nothing occasional about it. It's gotten to the point where some university or think tank did a formal study of the phenomenon with regard to Colbert's show, the results of which study were covered not only by Jon and Stephen, but were also at least mentioned on both MSNBC and Fox News.
- The Ohio State University study The Irony of Satire: Political Ideology and the Motivation to See What You Want to See in The Colbert Report says exactly what you'd expect. Interestingly, while liberals and conservatives interpreted Colbert's political leanings very differently, both groups thought he was equally funny.
- The Daily Show also has many segments that make you wonder whether the "news" presented is genuine or constructed.
- Of course, The Daily Show only points out the absurdities of the world: everything they "report" on is real. Their interpretation...eh, not so much.
- Regular watchers of both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report will have picked up that when they want to make sure we know they're showing something genuine, they'll present it by saying "...this actual footage of..."
- 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
- 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. This Tropper has been on both sides of poe's Law (mistaking a satire for real AND doing a satire that gets mistaken for real) it's particularly funny when the most blatant, ridiculous satire actually gets praise from a Christian.
- Fictional non-religious example, 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 Dalí once sent a telegram for Romania's communist dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu, for his adoption of a scepter as part of his regalia. Dalí'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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Just because I want to save everyone from ignoring this, which they shouldn't, as '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. And created a scandal because people didn't get the joke, it was so close to their suggestions anyway, but objected to cannibalism.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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◊.
- To this day there's a significant debate, in light of his other writings, as to whether Machievelli intened 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 mean 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.
- 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.
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