American jokes about lawyers

Abstract

AbstractIn 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.