Lawyer Jokes Abound, and the Defense Objects

Question: Why don’t lawyers go to the beach?

Answer: The cats keep trying to bury them.

While some might consider the term lawyer joke an oxymoron, a growing number of authors and editors appear to be turning the legal profession into the most fertile contemporary gag material since Vice President Dan Quayle.

A spate of joke books, ranging from “What to Do With a Dead Lawyer” through “Legal Wit and Whimsy” to “The Book of Legal Anecdotes,” has emerged in the last year, finding sometimes fiendish humor in the culture and conditioning of America’s highest-paid hourly workers.

Radio talk shows across the country have been feeding the frenzy, vying with each other in barrister-bashing and turning drive time into a sort of dial-an-insult derby for attorneys at large.

Frequent Jokester

A frequent on-the-air analyst of the trend has been Michael Rafferty, a Bolinas, Calif., writer and editor whose own joke book, “Skid Marks,” draws its title from the purported difference between a skunk and a lawyer found deceased in mid-highway: There are skid marks in front of the skunk.

“In the last few weeks especially, he’s had a bunch of radio interviews,” says Lloyd Khan, also of Bolinas, who worked with Rafferty on “Skid Marks.” “They don’t care about Michael or the book, they just want him to tell the jokes.”

Actually, says Rafferty, the book was Khan’s idea. “Nobody ever laughed at his jokes until he started telling lawyer jokes, so he said, ‘Wait a minute. Is there a book here?’ ”

Q: Why does Washington have the most lawyers per capita and New Jersey the most toxic waste dumps?

A: New Jersey got first choice.

Obviously, there’s nothing new about lawyer jokes per se. The attorney has been caricatured as garrulous, avaricious and hypocritical since Cicero’s time at least, and Dick the Butcher’s famous suggestion in “Henry VI”--that “the first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”--was designed by Shakespeare not for the T-shirts on which it’s seen today but as a gag line with broad appeal in Renaissance England. One recent book, “Devil’s Advocates,” by Jonathan and Andrew Roth, presents 171 pages of scholarly quotations designed to prove that people have been loathing and ridiculing lawyers for 3,000 years.

What is new, however, is the emergence of a virtual mini-industry in legal humor plus a venomous, defensive quality to some of the jokes, suggestive of more than a little public resentment toward the growing litigious throng. Those close to the joke books say that’s just the point.

In an era when the United States confounds the rest of the world by suiting up one lawyer for every 250 citizens (one for every 22 in the District of Columbia), “lawyers are everywhere and they’ve got their hands in everything,” says George Young, editor in chief of Ten Speed Press, the Berkeley, Calif., publisher of both “Skid Marks” and “What to Do With a Dead Lawyer.”

“Almost everyone these days has had some experience with a lawyer, and it’s usually unhappy and results in a large bill. Take the divorce rate alone as a start.”

Dayna Macy, Ten Speed’s publicity director, agrees. “We sat in the editorial meeting (deciding whether to publish the two books) and someone said, ‘Who hates lawyers?’ and everybody raised their hand. We figure our warped sensibilities aren’t far off the national average.”

Q: Why are scientists using lawyers instead of rats in medical experiments?

A: There are more lawyers to begin with, they multiply faster and laboratory personnel become less attached to lawyers than to rats. Then, too, lawyers will do many things rats won’t.

As you might suspect, not everyone is thrilled with the boom in lawyer bashing. The American Bar Assn., mindful of opinion polls that rank lawyers even lower in public esteem than journalists, has become so concerned with the lawyerly image that it has a special committee studying the issue. The Iowa State Bar even sent a task force to Sioux City after the recent plane crash there to caution circling attorneys against vulture-like behavior.

“Obviously, we’re concerned about lawyer bashing,” says Mark Harrison, outgoing chairman of the ABA’s committee on professionalism. “Lawyer jokes are just one manifestation of the problem.” He thinks many of the jokes are rooted in “the drama of the profession. . . . A lot of lawyers are pretty colorful characters.”

Terry Anderlini, a former California Bar Assn. president, has suggested that lawyers protest lawyer jokes by leaving the room when one is told. Another unamused lawyer, John Grillos of Maplewood, N.J., grumpily advised Rafferty to “hire a joke writer the next time you are in trouble.”

But other lawyers are less sensitive. Daniel R. White of Washington bailed out of Hogan & Hartson five years ago after penning “The Official Lawyer’s Handbook,” which one writer has described as “a hilarious appreciation of the finer qualities of the nation’s ambulance chasers.”

Riding the Wave

Published by Simon & Schuster, it vaulted onto the best-seller lists, and 150,000 copies later may have helped launch the current wave of legal humor. White, 36, appears to be riding that wave. He’s just published his fourth book (“Trials and Tribulations: Appealing Legal Humor”), and while he admits to doing free-lance legal work two to eight months a year, he makes part of the rest of his living cracking lawyer jokes before bar associations at fees that occasionally approach $4,000 a pop. His business card now reads “Attorney, Author, Raconteur.”

“I think these things go in surges,” he says about the current boom in lawyer joke books. His own works, he says, are more benign than “Skid Marks” and designed in part “to prove that lawyers do too have a sense of humor, even about themselves.” White says he’s gotten some criticism (“once from a partner at Hogan and another time from an elderly lawyer at Williams & Connolly”) but he says former ABA president Eugene Thomas told him he thought it might help the bar’s bedraggled image some if lawyers lightened up.

“Actually, the greatest sources of lawyer jokes are lawyers themselves,” White says. “That’s got to tell you something.”

But not everything.

To be fully informed you need “29 Reasons Not to Go to Law School” (now in its third printing “with six bonus reasons”). A product of Berkeley’s NOLA Press, “29 Reasons” suggests that the cure for lawyers is prevention--prevention of a law-school-born mind-set that replaces mirth, love, compassion and creativity with ambition, ego, legal babble and financial appetite. An ancient Mexican curse, the authors note, implores, “May your life be filled with lawyers.”

“This book,” its cover promises, “can save you three years, $70,000 and your sanity.”

A man was sent to hell for his sins. As he was being taken to his place of eternal torment, he saw a lawyer making passionate love to a beautiful woman. “What a rip-off,” the man muttered. “I have to roast for eternity and that lawyer gets to spend it with a beautiful woman.”

Jabbing the man with his pitchfork, his escorting demon snarled, “Who are you to question that woman’s punishment?”

Then, of course, there was the lawyer who stepped in cow dung and thought he was melting. . . .