The Last Lawyer Joke I'll Ever Tell

By Tony Wilson

I hate lawyer jokes, especially when they’re told by someone whose experience with our profession is limited to L.A. Law reruns, O.J. Trial highlights, or the wonderfully oxymoronic “Celebrity Justice.” Supposedly, we’re all scoundrels somehow deserving of being the butt end of a punch line; not to mention we’re also money-grubbing opportunists who make life far too complicated. An easy target, I suppose, since Shakespeare.

Yes, I’ve heard the one about the shark and professional courtesy. And I’ve heard the one about skid marks and the rat. Burying lawyers in sand? Heard it. Bicycles? Light bulbs? Cemeteries? Heard them all, like so much recycling on garbage day.

If I was clever enough, I’d come up with some witty Oscar Wildish retort every time I heard a lawyer joke that would turn the tables on the teller; the sort of thing Blackadder might say to Baldrick, or Marvin might say to Ford Prefect to put him in his place. But alas, I suffer from what the French call “l’esprit d’escallier,” or “staircase wit.” It’s when you think of the witty retort five minutes after the appropriately cunning moment while you’re heading up the stairs, thinking “Damn…I wish I’d said that.”

I suspect far too many of us suffer from staircase wit when some boob tells a bad lawyer joke at our collective ethical expense. So rather than write some high-minded editorial on how bad these jokes are and how they malign the profession (I tried that. It was resoundingly nuked), I’d like to suggest a contest instead – not for the best or worst lawyer joke, but for the best response to one. E-mail me your witty put downs and cutting responses to lawyer jokes and I’ll pick the best few, and put them in this column for all fellow sufferers. If I get one that’s really good, I’ll buy you lunch when Pirate Paks go on sale at White Spot. I’d like to prove that lawyers have a collective sense of humor. We’re accused of so much, I’d hate to think we’re guilty of not being funny.

Canadian doctors, I have recently learned, have their own magazine for humor. Stitches – The Journal of Medical Humor has articles on hockey playing doctors, physicians who act on the side, and other pieces on the lighter side of medicine, (which presumes, I suppose, that there is a lighter side to medicine). Every month they award a stethoscope to the funniest anecdote submitted by a doctor. The most surprising thing aboutStitches is that it’s targeted to a profession with about the same number of practitioners in Canada as ours, has a circulation of 38,000, and it’s been around for 14 years. If doctors can afford to support a humor magazine for their profession, why can't lawyers support a humor magazine for ours? Somebody call Canadian Lawyer (offer them a Pirate Pak).

There’s only one lawyer joke I like, and it has nothing to do with a misrepresentation of our ethics, and everything to do with our ridiculous propensity to take on more work. “The practise of law,” the joke goes “is like a pizza eating contest, where the prize is…more pizza.” Whether it’s funny or not isn’t as important as how true it is. Do good work and you’ll get more work. Get too much work, and you better find a good doctor for that triple bypass you'll need in a decade. If humor is, as the doctors say, a good healer, then we need all the laughs we can get.

Vancouver Franchise Lawyer Tony Wilson practices at Boughton Law Corporation in Vancouver, and has written for the Globe and Mail, Macleans Magazine and Canadian Lawyer. twilson@boughton.ca | www.boughton.ca/people/lawyers/tony_wilson

This article was published in the June 2004 issue of BarTalk. © 2004 The Canadian Bar Association. All rights reserved.