By: Mason Mattu, Humour Editor
A few weeks ago, The Peak’s staff attended NASH, Canada’s National Student Journalism Conference. While my colleagues went into this weekend with professional development in mind — I had one goal and one goal only. To rid The Ubyssey of their humour editor.
Let me back up and tell you where this beef began. For three weeks leading up to NASH, I had been receiving mysterious messages on my cell phone from a random number with a Vancouver area code. All I was receiving were memes of Shrek and John Pork. One message was a video of someone kicking dirt all over a copy of The Peak flipped to the Humour section. I gasped. What kind of monster would do something like that? I gasped again. I had done the same thing to a copy of The Ubyssey a week before . . . Only a fellow humour editor could have done that. It was time for revenge. A quick email to the previous humour editor from The Ubyssey gave me an unlikely ally (apparently there’s some unresolved shit between them) — someone who hated the enshittification (literally) of the section.
I looked around on the first day to see my fellow student journalists from across the country equipped with notebooks and copies of their papers to exchange. What losers. Me? I was wearing a bulletproof vest, a clown nose, and a microwave popcorn bag on my left arm. In my ears rang the tune of “Roar” by Katy Perry. No . . . I’m not weird. It was all part of the plan.
“How many of you are journalists?” Andrew Mrozowski, president of Canadian University Press, posed during the opening ceremony. Everyone’s hands shot into the air except for two people. Me and this one person with googly eyes on her nose. She and I locked eyes. I had secured my target.
Over the next few days, I pretended to take notes during workshops on topics such as “investigative journalism” and “how to kick your student union in the ass with it.” Yawn . . . until the moment I had been waiting for had come. The humour editor roundtable. I had a plan to eliminate the editor there and then, but we instead ended up joining forces against an anti-humour dude who was moderating the panel. In the most dire circumstances, sometimes our enemies become friends. We answered questions together, rebutted against the slander this guy was spewing, and even shared a few laughs. I had to remember my task. There was no room for distractions.
As my counterpart and I walked the halls of Capilano, I realized that I had caught her in a moment of weakness. She had been taunting me with those videos, but perhaps she was a changed woman. I shook my head and blasted “Roar.” It was time to get revenge for my people. To establish dominance over the clearly inferior humour section.
The previous humour editor was stationed by a roughly used microwave in a building. It was now or never. I ran over and opened the microwave, hoping that the soul of the humour editor would be sucked into the microwave. And so it did. The Ubyssey’s humour editor was pulled towards the stench and began laughing like she saw one of my totally funny humour pieces. She got sucked into the microwave portal and transformed into the remnants of spaghetti left in an old microwave.
I watched in horror as the spaghetti exited the microwave, forming the blob of a human. “You fool. You can’t kill humour,” my Ubyssey colleague spat at me. It was just then that another Shrek meme arrived to my phone. Her and I both looked at each other confused. If she was standing right in front of me . . . who was sending the Shrek meme?
“How many of you are journalists?” Mrozowski asked the students. None of the crowd raised their hands. They were instead generating memes . . . I started receiving a million texts from the same number I thought was from The Ubyssey. It was then that my enemy and I realized that a rivalry had emerged. We will have to work together to defeat them.
