If you're going to tell a joke ... try to get it right.(Dana Milbank's joke about Dick Cheney's shooting accident)

A FEW seasons back, on HBO's magnificent series The Sopranos, mob boss Johnny Sack hears through the grapevine that some of the guys have been making fun of his wife. She's got a weight problem, see--she's a big girl--and apparently one of the guys, over a game of poker, made some kind of smart remark. A joke or something. So Johnny goes to Carmine, the boss of the New York operation, referred to by the Jersey crew, using low and meaningful voices, as simply New York, and he asks Carmine to sanction a hit on the guy who told the joke, Ralph Cifaretto. Carmine is nonplussed. What was this joke, anyway? he asks. So Johnny Sack with great difficulty retells the joke he heard that Ralph Cifaretto told some guys about how fat his wife is: Someone at the poker game mentioned that Johnny's wife went to see a doctor, and Ralph then says, apparently, "Yeah, she's getting a 90-pound mole removed from her a**."

Carmine looks up from his espresso with a quizzical expression. He clearly doesn't understand the joke. So Johnny has to explain it, painfully: The implication here, he tells Carmine, is that my wife is so fat that her rear end ...