We called Mr. Cohen to find out how he went from being “The Ethicist”—a post he held for a dozen years—to the etiquette adviser at Ally Bank. Apparently, the advertising folks at iCrossing, fans of Mr. Cohen’s, got in touch about using him in a campaign for their client. But what about using the “Author, original NY Times Ethicist” chyron in the videos? Is the Gray Lady cool with that?

“The title identifies me; it doesn’t imply the Times’s endorsement—at least I hope it doesn’t. It’s like saying I went to Harvard,” Mr. Cohen told OTR, noting that he would never say that since he did not, in fact, go to Harvard. “Telling the truth is ethical.”

True to his word, when asked about his departure from the magazine, Mr. Cohen allowed that he didn’t step down but was pushed out. Mr. Cohen left when Hugo Lindgren took over almost two years ago. “I was fired.” he told OTR. “It’s not unfair, but it’s painful. Lots of things that are painful aren’t unfair. I’m like a jilted lover. If your ex gets together with someone great, you feel like a failure. If they end up with someone awful, then you think, ‘Was that what she thought of me?’”

Mr. Cohen’s old column first had a fling with Ariel Kaminer. Now the magazine is making it work with Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs author Chuck Klosterman—not that Mr. Cohen would know.

“I haven’t read it since I left. Watching from the outside is different,” he said.

Did promoting a bank raise any ethical red flags? Mr. Cohen said he had considered that, but decided advertising was okay. After all, The New York Times Magazine sold ads to Liberty Mutual that were adjacent to his column when the financial firm wanted to be identified with ethics. “The only problem is if it presents a conflict of interest or isn’t transparent,” Mr. Cohen said. Since Mr. Cohen’s job at the Times was to offer ethical opinions about readers’ domestic problems, there was no conflict of interest with the Times ads. Besides, “The New York Times was fine with it.”

According to Mr. Cohen’s moral calculus, the Ally spots might have presented an ethical quandary if he were offering advice about, say, banking regulations or government bailouts, instead of about regifting and borrowing cars. And besides, you can’t designate money as clean or dirty, Mr. Cohen explained, citing George Bernard Shaw, who once wrote, “The notion that you can earmark certain coins as tainted is an unpractical individualist superstition.” (Mr. Cohen used the same quote in a 2007 column, in response to an inquiry about whether somebody can accept rent money from a roommate who worked as a prostitute.)

Like Shaw, Mr. Cohen has written some plays since leaving the Times. He has also written a book, taken speaking engagements and started a podcast called “Person, Place, Thing,” on which famous guests talk about a person, place or thing they are particularly fond of. The podcast will officially launch at event at 92YTribeca later this month.

“It’s not like I have a drawer full of money,” said Mr. Cohen, who was a staff writer for Late Night With David Letterman before turning to the advice trade. Not that the Ally Bank spots are helping very much in filling up that drawer. He called the web advertising rates “shockingly low” and, as a harbinger of the web economy, particularly vexing for newspapers.

But then, lots of things that are painful aren’t unfair.

The question was posed by Randy Cohen, who writes the “Ethicist” column for The New York Times Magazine. He was at the Film Forum on Saturday to introduce the 1940 classic His Girl Friday, which depicts a world of double-speaking, cigarette-puffing reporters working the phones (“Get Duffy on the line!”) between hands of cards in the jailhouse pressroom.

“We will see reporter Hildy Johnson (that’s Rosalind Russell) and her editor Walter Burns do baaad, baaad things,” Cohen told the audience. “Things that would absolutely get you fired from The New York Times.”

“When it was released, several scenes were cut because reporters had begun to protest their portrayal as drunken, amoral, egomaniacs,” Cohen said with a big grin. “I don’t see what the problem was,” he added, pointing to the film’s prologue: “You will see in this picture no resemblance to the men and women of the press of today.”

In the movie, “they lie, they cheat they steal. There’s no other way to do what they’re doing,” Cohen explained later in an interview. “I barely have a favorite color,” he said, “but if I had to make a fairly large list [of my favorite films], a dozen say, this one would be on it.”

But even for Cohen, a professional ethics stickler, the rules of today’s Times are too literal. He harks back to the days of old-school Times editor and longtime reporter Abe Rosenthal, who had one major rule: “You can fuck an elephant for all I care as long as you don’t cover the circus.”

There are more rules these days. “The Times ethics code that has a thing in it like ‘it’s an election year and your spouse puts a bumper sticker on your car’—that’s something that has to be discussed,” said Cohen, who got in “minor trouble” for giving money to the liberal political group MoveOn.

“I think this is a terrible, terrible rule; you ought not give up your civic duties because you work for a newspaper,” he said over the phone.

Cohen has since agreed to never give money to MoveOn again, although he doesn’t agree that it is unethical to do so. He also thinks that specific rule is inconsistent.

What if, for example, Cohen wanted to join the Boy Scouts? “The Times is fine with that. But it seems to me that the scouts are a radical right-wing organization that forbids people who don’t believe in God from joining; they’re a horrible discriminatory organization but it’s fine with the Times if I give them money,” he said. “My point is that all organizations are ideological.”

Each week, Cohen said, he gets as many letters disagreeing with one of his stances as he gets new questions. Ultimately, though,the long-time humorist and Emmy-winning writer for David Letterman would rather have a laugh about ethics than get lost in the seriousness of it all.

“I checked The New York Times code of conduct, something you don’t want to do all that often,” he said, gearing up for his final punch line on Saturday night. “I found something that was very upsetting to me. Our code of conduct explicitly forbids us from breaking into buildings, homes, apartments or offices. It seems peculiarly specific about real estate! Had I known I probably would have chosen some other job.”