"Boston," a cramped Hollywood crime movie set populated primarily by the lesser Wahlbergs, is engaged in a gleeful back-and-forth exchange of japes with a national media outlet, calling to mind the beaming smile of a developmentally disabled child who has just been allowed to win a game of tag with a grown man.

After The Onion made fun of Boston yesterday, the city's largest newspaper—whose long-suffering journalists are forced to toil daily on behalf of a readership made up overwhelmingly of frequently drunk Bostonians—set out to prove that it, too, could participate in a lighthearted exchange of comedic jabs. The result was this Boston Globe story in which the paper facetiously purports to have discovered that The Onion is fake, due to various falsehoods in its story. What is intended to be a demonstration of Boston's ability to have fun at its own expense degenerates within a single paragraph into a sad spectacle of admission that even Boston residents cannot stand the outdated and ineffective infrastructure that plagues the cramped burg—nor is there a decent school or restaurant to be found within a cannon shot's radius of the twee downtown area. When the Globe concludes its faux-humorous soft toss exercise with "When a reporter queried a person entering the Prudential Center and asked if there is a restaurant on top, the man laughed and said, 'That's wicked funny,'" one can almost hear the tortured groans of self-loathing from the poor anonymous journalist forced to crank out such "wit," bemoaning the iniquities of fate that landed him in such a provincial and backwards-thinking little town, full of flinty Jameson addicts in tattered "Garciaparra" jerseys roaming the streets in search of people different from them to harass.

Get it straight, Boston: we don't kid because we love. We kid because Boston sucks.

Boston. Ha.

UPDATE: After exercising our First Amendment rights on this important topic, we were lewdly assaulted by the following profane rantings by the deputy press secretary of the mayor of Boston. Witness the shocking verbal attacks levied at any journalist who dares to question Hizzoner's reign of terror over that unhappy village:

Eh, maybe if Boston handed out some decent junkets reporters wouldn't make fun of it so much. You don't hear all that shit-talking about Vegas.

[Romenesko. Source photo via Shutterstock/Image by Jim Cooke.]