Flipside Staff member Penelope Peterson first learned Sunday that she was writing for a satirical newspaper, and not an actual newspaper. “You mean, this is all a joke!?” Penelope exclaimed when she heard the news. Apparently, Penelope had missed all of the satire, and had taken the news stories at face value. Distraught, Ms. Peterson asked, “You mean a hobbit colony wasn’t discovered under the engineering quad? I made care packages. I was going to go over there and deliver them.”
As the realization sunk in, Ms. Peterson began to question how she has spent the past ten weeks of her life. All of those articles she wrote about the plight of paraplegic albino dwarves, did people think they were jokes? The dozens of hours that she spent researching in the library for her article demonstrating a correlation between global warming and the size of Kanye West’s ego… was all that effort for nothing?
Today, Penelope Peterson is a lost soul. She feels as if there is no meaning in life. She has nightmares that her entire life is just one long episode of Candid Camera. She is afraid Ashton Kutcher is going to jump out from behind every corner and yell “You’ve been Punk’d Bitch!” A condition known as Kushtophobia (not really, but that’s the point). The Flipside feels bad for the former reporter, who according to the editor, “Wrote some of the funniest shit I have ever seen in my life.” Doctors say that there isn’t much that can be done to improve Ms. Peterson’s condition, but columnist Barney Schmutz, a licensed fake-psychiatrist, has pinky-promised that he will take care of her.
