Achieving easily the highest accomplishment in the 200-year-history of the American justice system, the Hasbro corporation has issued a legal statement clarifying that Fox News employee Harris Faulkner is not a cartoon hamster. The statement was necessitated by a $5 million lawsuit that Faulkner recently used her human hands and arms to slap the company with, owing to perceived similarities between herself and a toy in the company’s Littlest Pet Shop product line.
As previously reported, the toy in question—a small hamster doll—is also named Harris Faulkner, in what is either a very weird coincidence, or a very weird attempt to capitalize on children‘s well-known love of daytime Fox News hosts. Human-Faulkner claims that the plastic figurine is an attempt to capitalize on her brand (and maybe associate it with kids choking on her little plastic head, that part isn’t entirely clear), and has been trying to get Hasbro to stop making and selling the thing for months.
Now, the company has fired back, issuing a dismissal motion that suggests the massive toy conglomerate has retained the services of Deadpan, Bullshit, & Snark, attorneys at law, to write out the differences between the two: “Ms. Faulkner is an adult, African-American, human, female newscaster,” the statement begins, its writers preparing to enter the pantheon of legal heroes alongside Clarence Darrow and Daniel Webster. “The Hamster Toy,” meanwhile, “is an inch-tall, cartoon-like plastic animal, which has no apparent gender or profession, or even clothing that might identify its gender or profession.” (You probably weren’t expecting a legal case about a grown woman getting mad at a plastic toy for stealing her “eye shape and eye makeup design” to raise intriguing questions about the ways our clothing choices affect our apparent gender and profession, and it turns out that you would have been pretty much exactly right.)
Anyway, neither side seems like they’re going to back down, meaning we can expect this beautiful ballet to continue for at least a little longer. So don’t lose heart, friends; even when things are dark, you can be comforted by the knowledge that, somewhere in the world, there’s a legal intern being paid to put together a composite picture of a Fox News presenter and a plastic hamster doll, with arrows pointing out the similarities between them so that a jury finds them easier to spot.