Fred’s University English Department has been rocked by a scandal since the discovery of secret notes from the minutes of faculty meetings and what was known as the Ha Ha Ha Club. These notes go back decades and encompass all the years that Professor Moriarity, recently deceased, was Chair of the Department.
It appears that at some point in each faculty meeting, the Chair would pound on his Riverside Shakespeare and officially declare Off The Record. The mostly male faculty would then speak freely, having conversations they deemed not just hilarious but ribald, Rabelesian, and waggish.
The notes were not included in the official minutes of faculty meetings but were secretly assembled by Professor Moriarty’s first wife, then employed as Department Secretary.
Inspired by the recent reckoning with sexism in the academy, Sheila Moriarty released the minutes on the internet, and they are now part of a gender discrimination lawsuit against Fred’s University. The notes record the English faculty’s scintillating badinage about their shrill, mannish, bossy, unattractive female colleagues, and the delectable, toothsome, pert little hotties who were their undergraduate students.
Traditionally, after the Chair called Off The Record, and a satisfactory quip, witticism or bon mot was made, the faculty would bellow “Ha! Ha! Ha!”
The former Secretary points out that history got the last laugh at the Ha Ha Ha Club because the English Department has had to cede its beloved faculty room to the Department of Podcasting, which uses it for server storage and its collection of defunct cords, converters, and connectors. Ha ha ha.