Tom Matrullo writes about nervous publishers, humorless lawyers, bloggers, punsters, parody and play, all with with his usual anti-pedantic panache. Some samples:

...what's at stake here in the journalistic self-image is a proper understanding of the Difference between The Serious and The Not Serious, i.e., a model of play, which apparently is always the thing.

and...

Parody is one of the more seriously difficult modes of meaning to rigorously control precisely because it involves the use of mimicry - drawing acute attention to conventions of discourse - as an essential element to explore and usually to explode the very thing it is imitating. (It is seriously playful shit, and any simply binary effort to create law differentiating it from Serious Journalism is likely to suffer the slings and arrows of an infinite succession of meta-parodies, at the very least.)

and...

If you look, for example, at the fertile exploits of Gary Turner, or at the amazing in-depth interviews by Frank Paynter (which have reached a point at which we do not know whether the person being interviewed even exists), or at the dicey, polyvocal screeds of Mike Golby, or at RageBoy, you might sense something complex at work which, for want of a better word, I would call play.

Yes, yes! Precisely. This ties in with what I've been trying to say all along...