MINNEAPOLIS (The Borowitz Report)—A group of scholars who have been monitoring the descent of the bar over the past few decades have concluded that the bar can no longer be lowered, the scholars announced on Friday.

The academics, led by Professor Davis Logsdon, of the University of Minnesota, published their conclusion after their research definitively found that the bar had finally dropped to its lowest possible position.

“For those who thought the bar still had room to be lowered, our findings resoundingly contradict that assumption,” Logsdon said. “The bar is now essentially flush with the ground.”

Logsdon acknowledged that he and his fellow scholars have come under fire in the past for claiming that the bar could not be further lowered, specifically when they issued a paper to that effect after the selection of the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee in 2008.

“We got that one wrong,” he said. “Clearly, the bar still had a way to go.”

Now that the issue of whether the bar can be further lowered has been settled, Logsdon and his colleagues plan to examine the question of whether there is anything left to scrape at the bottom of the barrel. “Our findings are preliminary, but it appears that the answer is no,” he said.