Did You Hear the One About the NY Times and the Prostitute?

December 14th, 2006 11:32 PM

Conservatives have grown used to the New York Times being unintentionally amusing.  It's been trying to pass off leftist bias as "news" for years.

So it's kind of - well, funny - to see how the Gray Lady has trouble handling something that's intended to be humorous.

Its December 10 obituary on actor Sid Raymond ends with:

"One of his last jokes involved a son sending a prostitute over to his widowed father, in his 90s, still a self-proclaimed ladies’ man. She tells him she is his birthday present and will give him super sex.

'I’ll take the soup,' he says."

It took a few days, but someone at the Times finally figured out that the "joke" wasn't funny.  So it gave it yet another try on a December 13 correction:

"Because of an editing error, an obituary on Sunday about Sid Raymond, a comic actor, rendered one of his jokes incorrectly. It was about a son who sends a prostitute to his widowed father, still a self-proclaimed ladies’ man in his 90s. The prostitute tells the father that she is his birthday present and promises to give him 'super sex' (not that she promises to give him whatever he’d like.) The father replies, 'I’ll take the soup.'"

Maybe you had to be there.