JOHN S. TOLL PHYSICS BUILDING — Local College Park student, Simón Rivera, has recently gained notoriety for passing his physics midterm, a fate few in his class were able to claim. Rivera attributed all of his success to Saturday Night Live cast member, and headliner of the equally prestigious 2025 SEE Homecoming Comedy Show, Marcello Hernández. Rivera opted to attend the comedy show instead of studying for his midterm the next day, which gave him the confidence — and physics knowledge — needed to pass.

“To be honest? I haven’t been to a single lecture this semester,” Rivera said. “I just believed in Marcello. He taught me that the fat kid goes down the water slide faster than the skinny kid. Somehow that same question was on the midterm, and it was the only one at that! Marcello must’ve had the answer key or something, I don’t know.”

Rivera’s professor for his introductory physics class is a man by the name of Harcello Mernández, who looks eerily similar to Marcello Hernández, but with a killer mustache. While The Hare was not able to determine the authenticity of Mernández’s mustache, we could confirm that Hernández was not sporting a mustache at the comedy show — even if we think he could totally rock one.

Others were not so sure that the fat kid really would’ve reached the end of the waterslide faster. We spoke to one of Rivera’s classmates, Douglass Smunklepop, who did not pass the single-question midterm on the physics of the waterslide. Smunklepop offered us his explanation of the problem, unprompted.

“So, look, you take the gravitational constant and multiply that by the mass of the kid in moles, which then gets scaled by a factor of the flow of the water and then divided by the mass of the kid’s mother times Euler’s number. Assuming an idealized environment in which the kid and the mother take the form of perfect spheres with proportional mass, the terms all cancel out and you find that the fat kid and the skinny kid will reach the bottom at the same time.”

Smunklepop’s explanation was, of course, also assuming that the child didn’t lie about smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol, in which case they’d be at a foster home instead of the waterpark.

While the brightest minds at The Hare haven’t taken any physics classes since high school, and were thus unable to fact check any of these claims, we were able to contact Hernández for clarification on the physics in his standup routine. Among the commotion of a salon in which he presumably took our phone call, Hernández noted, “Look, I know these things, I used to have the cruel fate of working at a waterpark. And that Smunklepop guy? He sounds exactly like one of those annoying skinny kids I would’ve sent down the slide right before a lovely fat kid.”

Image Credits: Zachary Robinson