Due to a terrible accident, I hereby resign from my position – The Mass Media

Joe DiPersio has resigned from The Mass Media after a horrific accident. Get well soon and kind regards! Illustration by Bianca Oppedisano / Mass Media Staff

“Sorry, but we couldn’t save that ass.”

My first reaction to the doctor’s statement was denial, but as I peered across the room from my hospital bed, I noticed a lumpy object under a white blanket. Two familiar hills – MY hills – completely disconnected from the rest of me after a horrific Red Line-related accident. To save my life, the surgeons had, for whatever reason, been forced to amputate my ass, leaving me an assless freak forced to wander the earth unseating for the rest of my days.

Most worrying, however, was the fact that I was now staring at a butt – which happened to be my own – and not laughing. How could that be? After all, this is me we’re talking about, and butts are funny, right? But there was no giggle, no giggle, no chuckle, not even a grin. For me it just wasn’t funny. My sense of humor was gone.

For a few days the doctors tried to cure my funny bone with every joke they could think of, but it was unsuccessful. They even tried to lock me up in solitary confinement while Radiohead’s “How to Disappear Completely” played constantly and a pre-recorded robotic voice lectured me on the triviality of existence, hoping I would turn to comedy to deal with the inevitable existential one to cope with the crisis, but still there was nothing.

I was depressed without the fun side – the unproductive side. I was a one-sided coin. I was broken and the medics had no idea why. Until they uncovered one of my old articles from 2023 about disgraced UMass Boston professor Edgar Glute and his failed attempt to transplant a human’s butt onto a baboon. Glute believed in a long-debated concept called the Comedia-Asinus Theory, which states that the sense of humor is not connected to the brain but is “stored in the butt.”

While Glute’s experiment went haywire – resulting in him being incarcerated at the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane – it seemed, given my current humorless and buttless state, that Glute’s ideas might have had some merit. For this reason, I decided to donate my butt to science for further research; However, when the butt was removed from the butt compartment, it was discovered that someone had replaced it with a melon cut in half.

While the identity of the mysterious booty thief was unknown, it wasn’t long before I received an email from someone calling himself “The Booty Thief” asking me to meet him at midnight in the middle of the quad at UMass Boston. It wasn’t a big surprise who I met there.

“It’s me, disgraced UMass Boston professor Edgar Glute!” Glute shouted from the other side of the square. “You may be wondering how I escaped captivity, but with the help of Michael Amore, it was easy! His horse water made me strong and gave me the strength to break out of my steel cage! Now it’s time for the highlight of my life’s work!”

With a grin of evil anticipation, Glute took an object out of a sack. It was a familiar looking butt, or at least half of it looked familiar.

“Yeah, I stole your ass from the hospital!” Glute scoffed. “Half of my long-sought recipe for comedic success. The other? Well, this half was fished out of Boston Harbor, the only remnant of a horrific shark attack. That’s right, I combined Joe and Kyle’s cheeks, one each, to create THE MASTER ASS!”

It was a hideous abomination. A sluggishly put together Frankenstein comedy that Glute apparently wanted to transfer to himself on the spot. I tried to reason with the deranged professor, but it was useless. As he pulled off his own bottom and inserted the new one, he immediately burst into laughter, which quickly turned into screams of terror. His eyes burst into flames as pressure built up inside him, ready to explode. It was too funny.

I accepted my fate and realized I was too close to survive the explosion. But when Glute finally burned, it seemed as if some kind of force field had protected me from the inferno. When I looked up, I saw the ghost of a mustache I used to know with his hand outstretched, protecting me.

“Kyle?”

As the fires subsided, I stood speechless in the square, looking at the blue, delicate body of my late friend and former humorist Kyle Makkas.

“Hey man, how are you?” Kyle asked casually.

“You saved me?” I asked in disbelief. “Why? What reason do I have for living without a butt? What am I without humor?”

Kyle exuded an aura of wisdom that I assume only comes with death, before replying, “You’ll know in time.”

Knowing Kyle well, I knew this was a load of crap.

“That’s a pretty fancy way of saying you don’t know.”

“Okay, well, I don’t know!” said a nervous Kyle. “But I’m sorry for saving your life, dude!”

“I would have preferred if you had left me to die,” I shouted, slightly annoyed. “It’s like when Obi-Wan left Anakin on Mustafar. He should have just done the right thing and taken him out!”

Kyle waved his ghost hand at me dismissively.

“Obi Wan? This is a COMPLETELY different situation! You know what? I’m going back to the underworld of humor. F—you.”

And with that, Kyle disappeared, leaving me alone in a world with no butt. I ended up getting a decent wooden prosthetic to keep up appearances – and to keep my pants up – but I realized I would never be able to write humor again. I just wasn’t funny anymore.

Therefore, with a heavy heart and out of respect for high-quality content, I decided to act responsibly. I am hereby resigning from my position as humor editor at The Mass Media.