Volume 21, Issue 4

In the 1980s, a substantial cycle of lawyer jokes appeared in the United States. Unlike earlier waves of American jokes, the jokes did not spread to Britain and Europe, nor did the peoples of these countries invent large numbers of new jokes about lawyers at this time. The dominant theme of the American jokes was that lawyers are canny—i.e. calculating, crafty, and fond of money. It is striking that such jokes should be told about a group so close to the very core of American society, a society defined by its laws to a far greater extent than the countries of Western Europe. The nearest comparison is with the jokes told about the stupidity of politicians and apparatchiks, the groups at the very center of the former socialist regimes in Eastern Europe in the 1980s. The latter were an indication of the economic stagnation and irrationality of socialism, and the price of stupidity was collapse and failure. The American lawyer jokes relate to the price of American success, namely the intensifying of economic competitiveness that took place in America in the 1980s. American jokes about lawyers are often sadistic tales in which we are invited to rejoice in their meeting a painful death or being slain. Yet death threat jokes about lawyers have no serious counterpart; indeed it is because the jokes do not connect with reality that they circulate so freely. The relationships between our social frustrations and resentments, our choice of targets for “hostile” jokes, and our manifestations of real aggression are complex and uncertain.

After 1980, there was a marked increase in the presence, prominence, and hostility of lawyer jokes in the United States. The long-established themes of joking about lawyers were joined by a whole set of new themes, including those depicting lawyers as objects of scorn and as deserving of extermination or removal from society. Several possible explanations for the shift are examined and found insufficient, including worsening behavior by lawyers, the general spread of cruelty, and the dictates of political correctness. The article argues that the shift in lawyer joking is best understood as a recoil against the pervasive legalization of life in combination with the distinctive American style of diffuse court-and-lawyer centered governance.

Christianity has long been held to be at odds with humor. Centuries of Christian theology, as well as modern studies on religion, illustrate this tension. Though confessing that many Christians and Christian institutions have adopted theological attitudes and orientations that militate against many forms of laughter, this article reconsiders the vexed relationship between Christianity and humor, maintaining that rapprochement between the two seemingly disparate entities holds promise. After surveying previous attempts at reconciling Christianity and humor, the article—drawing upon modern humor theory as well as the field of epistemology—proposes a theoretical framework upon which Christianity can authentically embrace humor and consequently, despite the sackcloth-and-ashes image associated with it, can also be funny as hell.

Neither in Dutch nor in European narrative folklore does the lawyer have a positive reputation. It does not matter whether we look at the past or the present: in folktales the practice of lawyers is associated with greed, trickery and heartlessness. In the Middle Ages, when the profession was literally for sale, judges were accused of corruption and incompetence, but their reputation improved over time when they became well-educated and impartial professionals. In present and past, the common man looks upon justice as incomprehensible and unpredictable. European and American folktales (especially jokes) about law and lawyers basically share the same themes, but there is a remarkable difference in quantity nowadays. Whereas lawyer jokes are hype in the U.S., they are not in the Netherlands or Western Europe. The main reason seems to be the American “vulture culture” of suing, claiming, and cashing, as exposed in the news media. If Dutch and European lawyers take over the mores of their American colleagues, it will just be a matter of time before a vast number of lawyer jokes are transferred and translated.