How To Make Jokes and Puns

Today’s Post reports that “An officer conducting an inspection at a Bronx narcotics unit last week found a soft-core porn movie playing on one of the TVs in the facility, police sources said. The skin flick was playing on a satellite-TV premium channel. That violates an NYPD policy banning such channels at work.” Okay, so! The newspaper has done its job, by playing straight man. (Although this is a terrible headline.) Still, they have set up, by my back-of-the-envelope calculations, at least 45⁰³ possible jokes. Heaven! And yet, the lone commenter on this story at the Post is doing it wrong. Let’s explain!

So you see what happened. Someone came in and made a MESS of the opportunities presented. They went, you see, too far.

It’s a perfectly fine, if sort of expected joke, to say there will be a “deep probing investigation,” or some such. I mean, definitely expected. There’s so many better places to go?

But, most of all, you cannot say there will be a “deep anal probing” investigation, because, that doesn’t actually make much sense except in the literal sense! And how would the NYPD find out who left soft-core porn on at work by means of cavity searches? That just doesn’t work. I realize this commenter was working hurriedly, before 9 a.m., but there’s no excuse for such laziness. I’m feeling very dispirited by this.