That's so funny I forgot to laugh

Some Canadian law students put together Dear 16-Year-Old Me: Don't Go to Law School, which is among other things a parody of a popular PSA about early cancer detection.

It's clever and well-done, but as is often the case with parody and satire, it can be interpreted on multiple levels. For instance, if we interpret it in terms of the authors' original intent it seems probable that it's not really intended as a warning not to go to law school (it's sponsored by Westlaw after all).  Rather, it's supposed to be understood in the tradition of law school comedy revue shows and the like, which make fun of how awful law school and the practice of law are, but in a spirit which makes it perfectly clear to all well-socialized participants and observers that this does not of course mean that going to law school is acutally a bad idea. Indeed well-socialized law students participate in these sorts of rituals precisely because they're supposed to be light-hearted satires rather than serious critiques.  A law professor who took offense at this video would be considered a humorless, poorly socialized buffoon (Don't you get it? They're just kidding!)   

(Further evidence for this interpretation of the authors' conscious intent is provided by the fact that, according to a Youtube commenter, "the old version of this video included the tear soaked, empassioned plea of friends, family and children of law students. The hardest parts to watch were the small child saying that he hadn't seen his daddy in 3 years and the weeping wife. I guess the creator changed the video because it hit too close to home for someone.").

Now if one imagines that the authors of this video were unemployed lawyers who normally post on JD Underground and the like, it becomes a very different text.  Such a re-authoring would produce an interpretation that assumed the video's message was intended to be taken quite literally -- and of course that reading of it would make it highly offensive to well-socialized members of our little world.

In addition, such an alternative version of the video would be twice as long -- or rather the existing version would be edited to half its current length, and the final two minutes would be very different.  In the JD Underground version, the final half of the video would make clear that the first half -- the part about how becoming a lawyer will ruin your life -- constitutes the optimistic scenario: the one in which people who go to law school actually become lawyers, with big enough salaries to pay off their debts and buy houses with impressive walk-in closets etc., although at the cost of their souls, their psychological well-being, and their family happiness.

As many people have noted, the best humor is almost invariably subversive of the social order.  Interpreted literally, rather than as I suspect the authors of the video consciously intended it to be interpreted, the video becomes much darker, much funnier, and much more subversive, even without the missing portion about how, by the way, you're not actually going to get a job at the end of all this.