Fifty Shades of Grey demoted to Forty-Nine after judge orders recount

The popular sex instruction manual Fifty Shades of Grey has this week suffered a blow by being demoted one whole shade. Judges in Laughingstate County ordered the book to be renamed Forty-Nine Shade of Grey after complex legal wranglings. Our man in the know, Greg Poots, told us:

"I've been following the case for some while now, and I still don't really know what's going on. It seems that Chief Justice Mark Simmons' wife was a big fan of the book, which in turn cause him to develop a natural and fair dislike for it, and its author E L James. Originally the intention was to get the book banned from the county, but this has since been revised to removing one of its shades. Mysterious, odd, but still totally within the boundaries of accepted legal practice."

Justice Simmons has previously indicated that if the attempt to "remove a shade" be successful, he would lobby other courts to continue the process; the suggestion being that the long term aim is to force the removal of all fifty shades so as to effectively destroy the book entirely. Since the ruling has now gone through, it may not be long before human kind eradicates the book in the same vein as smallpox and figure-skate boxing.

"It's certainly a bold move," continued Poots. "And I've seen similar things work. In 1998, the massively obese Simmons successfully oversaw the removal of gluttony from the state's official list of deadly sins. "