The intention with this little skit is to get you to discover two very similar words which form a transitive/intransitive pair. There are only very few such pairs in English.
Boswell: I must lay Jean-Jacques Rousseau's mistress.
(Later) I got laid!
Dr Johnson: Wrong! Certainly, if Mlle Boustrop lay with
you, then you lay with her.
But, the transitive 'lay' is not reflexive. If
a bird lays an egg, the egg gets laid, not the
bird.
If you laid Mlle Boustrop, it's she who got
laid not you.
Boswell: I'm sorry.
But what about Joseph Addison's prayer?
"Now I lay me down to sleep.
Pray the Lord my soul to keep."
'Lay' is reflexive there.
Dr Johnson: (Tourette tic)Did you find the very similar intransitive verb which forms a pair with ‘lay’? Dr Johnson uses it in the past tense, in which form it is homophonic with the present tense of ‘lay’.
Read more at ErgativeVerb and InTransitive
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