I’ll take the soup!

In today’s NY Times, one of the best corrections I’ve seen in many hours spent on good old page A2 ove many years:

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.”

I’d sure hate to be a copyeditor at the Times — their corrections editor is always blaming everything on “editing errors.”

But I do want to know — who’s the goofball who changed a joke in an obituary. Apparently, the same kind of goofball who thinks they can re-write a joke in an obituary, likely because they didn’t catch the pun on “super sex” vs. “soup or sex”.

Just imagine the angry fans who came upon a butchered joke where a prostitute said “I’ll give you whatever you like” and the elderly Cassanova replied “I’ll take the soup.” Nobody’s been that upset at a comedy routine since I unveiled my “dead milk” series of gags to no acclaim more than 20 years ago in New Jersey.