“Sorry, but we were unable to save the butt.”
My first reaction to the doctor’s statement was one of denial, but peering across the room from my hospital gurney, I noticed a lumpy object underneath a white blanket. Two familiar hills—MY hills—completely severed from the rest of me after having been in a terrible, Red Line-related accident. The surgeons, for whatever reason, had been forced to amputate my butt to save my life leaving me an assless freak forced to wander the Earth for the rest of my days unsitting.
Most concerning of all, though, was the fact that I was now staring at a butt—which just so happened to be my own—and not laughing. How could this be? After all, it’s me we’re talking about, and butts are funny, right? But there wasn’t a chuckle or a snicker or a chortle or even a smirk. It just simply was not funny to me. My sense of humor was gone.
For a few days, doctors attempted to mend my funny bone by using every kind of joke imaginable, but it was all to no avail. They even tried locking me in solitary confinement with Radiohead’s “How to Disappear Completely” playing on repeat and a prerecorded robotic voice lecturing me on the trivial nature of existence, hoping I would turn to comedy to cope with the inevitable existential crisis, but still, there was nothing.
I was depression without the funny side—the unproductive kind. I was a one-sided coin. I was broken, and medical professionals had no idea why. That was, until they uncovered one of my old articles written in 2023 about disgraced UMass Boston professor, Edgar Glute, and his failed attempt to transplant the butt of a human onto a baboon. Glute believed in a long-debated concept known as Comedia Asinus Theory, which proposes that the sense of humor isn’t linked to the brain but is instead “stored in the butt.”
While Glute’s experiment went haywire—resulting in him being locked up in the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane—with my current humorless and buttless condition, it seemed that there was potentially some merit to Glute’s ideas. Because of this, I decided to donate my butt to science to have it further studied; however, when the butt was fetched from the butt locker, it was discovered that someone had replaced it with a sliced-in-half cantaloupe.
While the identity of the mysterious ass swiper was unknown, it wasn’t long before I received an email from someone who called themselves “The Booty Thief” requesting that I meet them in the middle of UMass Boston’s quad at midnight. Who I encountered there came as little surprise.
“It is I, disgraced UMass Boston professor, Edgar Glute!” screamed Glute from across the quad. “You may be wondering how I escaped my imprisonment, but it was simple with the help of Michael Amore! His Ross Water made me strong, giving me the power to break free of my steel cage! Now, it is time for the culmination of my life’s work!”
With a grin of evil anticipation, Glute removed an object from a sack. It was a familiar-looking butt, or at least, half of it was familiar.
“Yes, I stole your butt from the hospital!” mocked Glute. “One half of my long-sought recipe for comedic success. The other? Well, that half was fished out of Boston Harbor, the only surviving remnant of a terrible shark attack. That’s right, I have combined the cheeks of Joe and Kyle, one from each, to create THE MASTER ASS!”
It was a hideous abomination. A Frankensteined amalgamation of comedy stitched lazily together that Glute seemed poised on transplanting onto himself then and there. I tried to reason with the deranged professor, but it was useless. Dropping his own ass off and inserting the new one, he broke into an instant fit of laughter that quickly devolved into cries of terror. His eyes burst into flames as pressure started building up inside him ready to blow. It was too funny.
I accepted my fate, realizing that I was too close to survive the blast. But when Glute finally combusted, it appeared that some kind of force field had shielded me from the inferno. Looking up, I saw the ghost of a mustache that I used to know with its hand stretched out protecting me.
“Kyle?”
Once the fires subsided, I stood speechlessly on the quad, looking at the blue, wispy body of my deceased friend and former humor writer, Kyle Makkas.
“Hey man, how’s it going?” Asked Kyle nonchalantly.
“You… saved me?” I asked in disbelief. “Why? What reason do I have to live without a butt? What am I without humor?”
Kyle exuded an aura of wisdom that I assume only comes with death before responding, “You will know in time.”
Having known Kyle well, I knew this was a load of crap.
“That’s a pretty fancy way of saying you don’t know.”
“Okay, fine, I don’t know!” Spoke a flustered Kyle. “But SORRY for saving your life, dude!”
“I would have rather you left me to die,” I shouted in mild annoyance. “It’s like when Obi-Wan left Anakin on Mustafar. He should’ve just done the right thing and finished him off!”
Kyle waved a ghost hand at me dismissively.
“Obi-Wan? This is a COMPLETELY different situation! You know what? I’m going back to the humor nether realm. F— you.”
And with that, Kyle vanished, leaving me alone in a world without a butt. While I did end up getting a decent wooden prosthetic to keep appearances up—and to help my pants stay up—I realized there was simply no way I’d be able to write humor ever again. I just wasn’t funny anymore.
So, with a heavy heart and a respect for quality content, I have decided to do the responsible thing. I am hereby resigning from my post as The Mass Media’s humor editor.