Your Mortgage : You Can Bank on Humor at Expense of Lenders

Each week in this column, you read about a variety of issues that concern you and your mortgage--how to shop for a loan, when to refinance, which way interest rates are going and the like.

But summertime is here, and it’s time to take a brief vacation from such matters and instead have a little fun at the expense of the people we often write about--the lenders themselves.

You’ve probably heard the old joke that “a bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don’t need it.” It’s credited to comedian Bob Hope, who made the quip back in the 1960s.

But truth is, people began poking fun at lenders shortly after the Chinese introduced the first metal coins nearly 4,000 years ago, making the banking system possible.

And with the possible exception of lawyers, bankers have been the butt of more jokes than any other group of professionals.

Have you ever walked into a bank and it seems that everybody’s a vice president? Will Rogers did, back in 1922.

“Will you please tell me what you do with all the vice presidents a bank has?” he asked an audience one day. “I guess that’s to get you discouraged before you can see the president.

“Why, the United States is the biggest institution in the world and they only have one vice president--and nobody has ever found anything for him to do.”

If you’re like many people, you cringe at the thought of having to visit your bank. The lines are often long and the service sometimes slow.

“Except for the con men borrowing money they shouldn’t get and the widows who have to visit the handsome young men in the trust department, no sane person ever enjoyed visiting a bank,” wrote author Martin Mayer in 1984.

Actually, Mayer was wrong--con men and widows aren’t the only ones who like going to the bank. In fact, one of the best-known personalities of the Depression Era said, “It is a rather pleasant experience to be alone in a bank at night.”

It was safecracker Willie Sutton, who allegedly burglarized more than 20 banks in the 1920s and ‘30s.

Webster’s Dictionary says a banker is “a person who owns or manages a bank.” Mark Twain, however, had his own definition.

“A banker is a fellow who lends his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain,” Twain wrote back in 1893.

American journalist and poet Ambrose Bierce gave this whimsical definition in 1906:

“Creditor, n. One of a tribe of savages dwelling beyond the Financial Straits and dreaded for their desolating incursions.”

Charles Lamb, an English essayist, took an anthropological view of the matter.

“The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races; the men who borrow, and the men who lend,” he wrote in 1818.

But poet Ogden Nash would beg to disagree. In fact, he even wrote a poem about lenders in 1938--”Bankers are Just Like Anybody Else, Except Richer.”

Looking back, some quotes from decades ago almost seem prophetic.

Consider the savings and loan crisis, which continues to claim the lives of hundreds of S&Ls; that were such high-fliers in the ‘70s and early ‘80s.

“These heroes of finance are like beads on a string--when one slips off, all the rest follow,” playwright Henrik Ibsen wrote more than a century ago.

It’s believed that about half of all bank failures over the past few years were caused by mismanagement or outright fraud. So did German-born dramatist Bertolt Brecht have a crystal ball when, in 1928, he quipped: “What is robbing a bank, compared with founding a bank?”

Lenders like to say that theirs is a complex business, but American philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr neatly summed up the basics in just one sentence back in 1953:

“Our whole intricate system of credit depends on the belief that most people are honest most of the time.”

Fortunately, most lenders know how to take a joke--and sometimes they even poke fun at themselves.

Several years ago, Bank Leumi Trust Co. of New York launched an advertising campaign touting its ability to make loans quickly. Its slogan: “If it took six days to create the world, why should it take four weeks to get a loan?”

And then there’s an old joke that’s been told thousands of times about a variety of professionals, from lenders to car salesman. No one seems to know who wrote or uttered it first: Reference books on quotations simply attribute it to “anonymous.”

“You know the difference between a dead skunk and a dead banker on the road?” the joke goes.

“There are skid marks by the skunk.”