Bad Santa: Kentucky Paper Apologizes for Off-Color Christmas Jokes

By: (AP) A weekly newspaper in eastern Kentucky has apologized for printing off-color Christmas jokes that left some blushing readers as red as Santa's suit.

The Lawrence County Storm also retrieved unsold copies of this week's edition from newsstands in and around Louisa, where it is published.

Meanwhile, Louisa Mayor Teddy Preston said he began receiving phone calls from constituents who were both angered and embarrassed by the jokes.

"It was very, very vulgar," Preston said. "It is something that shouldn't have been written in a local newspaper or anywhere else, for that matter."

Some of the jokes put Santa in sexually explicit situations. Some made light of the religious side of Christmas.

Others were simply corny, like the one that asked why you never hear much about Olive, the 10th reindeer. "Yeah, you know, Olive the other reindeer used to laugh and call him names."

The newspaper's publisher, Glen Cassady, couldn't be reached for comment. Elva McCoy, a member of the newspaper staff, told WSAZ-TV in Huntington, W.Va., that the jokes were published by mistake.

McCoy told the TV station that someone on the staff had been reading the jokes on the Internet and that they had inadvertently made their way into the newspaper.

Preston said if that is actually what happened, someone should have caught the mistake while proofreading the page.

"There have been cases before where people have typed a silly comment and somehow that got into the paper," said David Thompson, executive director of the Kentucky Press Association. "What it takes to do that is beyond me."

Thompson said most newspapers are careful to exclude vulgar language from their pages, though some have become more liberal over the past 10 to 20 years.

"As far as any real vulgarity, it is not widespread at all. Most newspapers make sure they police it."

Preston praised the Louisa paper for trying to retrieve unsold copies of the newspaper.

"I wouldn't want my children to read that language," he said.