6 ever so slightly so that the form was able to mock its 4 own idiocies. This is not a mere linguistic anecdote. The point is instead that without the capacity to fool someone, par- ody is functionally useless, deprived of the tools in- scribed in its very etymology that allow it, again and again, to perform this rhetorically powerful sleight-of- hand: It adopts a particular form in order to critique it from within. See Farah v. Esquire Magazine, 736 F.3d 528, 536 (D.C. Cir. 2013). Parody leverages the expectations that are created in readers when they see something written in a par- ticular form. This could be anything, but for the sake of brevity, let’s assume that it is a newspaper head- line—maybe one written by The Onion—that begins in this familiar way: “Supreme Court Rules . . . ” Already, one can see how this works as a parodic setup, leading readers to think that they’re reading a newspaper story. With just three words, The Onion has mimicked the dry tone of an Associated Press news story, aping the clipped syntax and the subject matter. The Onion could go even further by putting that headline on its website—which features a masthead and Latin motto, and the design of which parodies the aesthetics of ma- jor news sites, further selling the idea that this is an actual news story. 4 Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica 196-97 (H. Rush- ton Fairclough, transl., Harvard University Press, 1926), https://bit.ly/3Rhbm0j.