No other outlet has had more fun with the “death of newspapers” tune than Comedy Central on The Daily Show and Colbert Report. Wednesday night, Daily Show correspondent Jason Jones paid a visit to the New York Times building. NYT executive editor Bill Keller offered himself up as a very amiable, if awkward, straight man:

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—Jones: Tell me about your love for this creaky old rag.
—Keller: It’s always been one of the higher aspirations in the business to work for the New York Times. These days, we’re a little bit like the last ship afloat; we have all these lifeboats floating around underneath us, and people are dying to clamber on board.
—Jones: But your lifeboats are made of paper, right?

At this point, Keller vainly struggles for an answer, but quickly recognizing he’d only dig a deeper hole in his proverbial “lifeboat,” he opts for silence. Later, Jones turns the old riddle “What’s black, white and red all over?” on its head, telling Keller it’s not a newspaper, but the NYT’s “balance sheet.” See the video clip after the jump