Book Smart

A sweeping look at jokes that lampoon lawyers and the tensions between Americans’ respect for law and disdain for attorneys is the focus of Galanter’s book.

The jokes, which gained momentum in the late 1970s, often portray lawyers as greedy sowers of chaos and corruption and even fantasize about their demise.

“There’s an underlying fantasy of, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to get rid of lawyers and all of the regulation that intrudes into your life?’” Galanter says. “There’s a recoil to the legalization of life, and lawyers are the lightning rods for that.”

An example: A lawyer called the governor’s mansion at 3:30 a.m., insisting that he must speak to the chief executive on a matter of extreme urgency. Eventually, an aide decided to awaken the governor.

“Well, what is it?” demanded the governor.

“Well, governor,” said the caller, “Judge Parker just died and I want to take his place.”

The response came immediately: “It’s all right with me, if it’s all right with the undertaker.”

Galanter says lawyer jokes seem to be oddly American, and he traces some of the animus that people have for attorneys to the expansion of the law in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, changes that afforded new protections for citizens.

“Law was seen as a liberating thing that gave more remedies to individuals ranging from school children to minorities to prisoners who were now able to use the law,” Galanter says. “Suddenly, the managers of society were held to account by lawyers.”

The prevalence of lawyer jokes is ironic, Galanter says, because Americans tend to hold the law in high regard, but not its practitioners. And surveys have shown that when people are asked about their own treatment by lawyers, they are generally satisfied, he adds.

By the 1980s, Galanter says there was a rise in more aggressive humor that shifted from mockery to outright hostility. Galanter traced some of their roots to jokes about Communists and Jews that were often decades old, but changed to accommodate lawyers.

One old saw goes like this:

What do you call 6,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea? A good start.

Galanter says that after the joke appeared in the early 1980s and was directed at feminists, blacks, Iranians and Jews, the version featuring lawyers gained widespread traction.

“A lot of lawyer jokes were about Jews. A lot of lawyer jokes were about politicians,” he says. “They are indicators of these currents of underlying sentiment — out- croppings that show what the social trends were when the jokes were in fashion.”

Galanter, as a collector of lawyer jokes, says attorneys are split on their feelings about the jokes.

“There’s a minority of lawyers who are offended and unforgiving. A bigger minority really like them, and more are ambivalent,” he says. “But some are rather proud. If your group is the butt of jokes, they see it as a badge of status.”