Miscellaneous

Blawg Book Highligher #21: Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture

By Bill Gratsch

Blawg Book Highlighter # 21: Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture

At my law school graduation party, one of the gag gifts I got was an ambulance that made a "real" siren sound. The joke, of course, was that I was about to embark on a career as an ambulance-chaser.

When you tell someone you're a lawyer, there's a good chance that person will respond with a lawyer joke. You'll smile and maybe even muster up a chuckle, as you pretend you've never heard it before.
So how many law professors does it take to make a scholarly study of lawyer jokes? The answer: One. That being University of Wisconsin law professor Mark Galanter, who has written a book, "Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture" (University of Wisconsin press), on the subject.

In "Lowering the Bar," Galanter examines the history of this genre of American humor, its rapid growth in popularity in recent years, and the culture fostering that rise. What he finds is "the increasing reliance on law coexists uneasily with anxiety about 'legalization' of society."

Carlin Romano, writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer, calls the book "Hilarious and philosophical at the same time, a nifty probe of the genre, regularly guilty of wise humor."

Alan J. Couture of ForeWord Magazine calls "Lowering the Bar" an "excellent compendium of lawyer jokes and their historical and sociological niche in society." He says it "provides an incredible amount of historical background for numerous legal jokes and analyzes how the lawyer has been perceived over the past few centuries and is viewed in society today." His conclusion: "Anyone who finds lawyer jokes humorous (including most lawyers) or has always wondered about how and why they became so popular will very much enjoy this 'lowering the bar.'"

Some of the lawyer jokes excerpted from "Lowering the Bar":

- "Two lawyers are sitting at a bar drinking when a stunning blonde in a skin-tight, low-cut dress slinks by. One of them stares for a minute, then turns to his buddy and says, 'Boy, would I like to screw her!'
The other lawyer asks, 'Out of what?'"

- "An ancient, nearly blind old woman retained the local lawyer to draft her last will and testament, for which he charged her two hundred dollars. As she rose to leave, she took the money out of her purse and handed it to him, enclosing a third hundred dollar bill by mistake. Immediately the attorney realized he was faced with a crushing ethical question: Should he tell his partner?"

- "When President Theodore Roosevelt was trying to persude his son to become a lawyer, he used the following argument: "A man who never graduated from school might steal from a freight car. But a man who attends college and graduates as a lawyer might steal the whole railroad."

-"Two muggers met in an alley, one of them breathless.
I just tried to mug a lawyer," the man panted.
"Cripes," said the other. "He get anything?"

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Randy Richardson is an author, humorist, former journalist, and a lawyer. His fiction debut, Lost in the Ivy, a murder mystery set against the backdrop of Chicago's storied Wrigley Field, won the Writers Marketing Association's ?Fresh Voices? Book Award and the Illinois Woman's Press Association's Mate E. Palmer Communications Contest. He writes the Dad Libs column for SanityCentral.com and is a frequent contributor to Chicago Parent magazine. In his day job, he is an attorney for the Social Security Administration?s disability appeals branch. At night and during lunch breaks, he serves as president of the Chicago Writers Association (chicagowrites.org) and works on his second novel while a 4-year-old tugs on his legs. Visit his website at www.lostintheivy.com.

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Full post as published by Blawgs Blog by Bill Gratsch on February 02, 2008 (boomark / email).