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Not The Aristocrats; Lawyer jokes have moved into the big-firm world, and what they say about partner-associate dynamics is dead serious.
Can lawyer jokes tell us anything about the current state of the profession? In the real world, the legal profession is increasingly specialized and intensely stratified. In the world of lawyer jokes, these differentiations are only faintly apparent. Jokes about doctors frequently compare particular types of practitioners: surgeons, internists, psychiatrists, and so forth. But there are no jokes contrasting different kinds of lawyers, and few that are specifically aimed at particular kinds of legal specialists. The lawyers in jokes tend to be generic, undifferentiated, and almost always in private practice. They usually work for individual clients, even though in the real world, most lawyers supply services to large organizations, not individuals. Still, I think that we can learn something about lawyers from the jokes that are told about them. For instance, in the few jokes that do touch on practice in large law firms, the preeminent subject is tension between junior and senior lawyers. Stories about seniors instructing and exploiting young lawyers and about juniors turning the tables on their senior colleagues have been around for a long while. But the burgeoning growth of large firms has given them a new prominence. Consider the following, two jokes that have shifted to lawyers from other subjects in recent years.
Marc Galanter is the John and Rylla Bosshard professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin Law School and Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Citations for the jokes in this piece are presented in his book Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).
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