Lawyer jokes can go too far
The Calgary Herald
August 11, 2007

If you happen to cross paths with Robert Patzelt this weekend, you'd be wise to hold off on the lawyer jokes.

It's not that the legal eagle doesn't have a sense of humour.

"Most lawyers have no problem with laughing at themselves now and then," says Patzelt, a former Edmontonian now practicing law in Halifax .

"But don't think there is a lawyer joke out there that I haven't heard," he says with a laugh. "If you're going to tell me one, it better be new and it better be good."

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But widespread antipathy towards the legal profession, which finds its most obvious expression in the form of lawyer jokes, is nothing new.

Marc Galanter can recite centuries-old lawyer jokes.

"People have been telling jokes about lawyers' supposed greed for a long, long time," says Galanter, a University of Wisconsin law professor whose 2005 book, Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture, examines the longtime tradition of lawyer jokes.

What concerns Galanter is the changing tone of modern-day lawyer jokes.

"In the early 1990s, I noticed the jokes were taking on an increasingly hostile tone," says Galanter. "Suddenly, it went from greed and our weird use of language, to lawyers being immoral, treacherous and candidates for extermination."

Galanter, who blames the ramped-up nastiness on the disillusion among Americans from such events as the Vietnam War and Watergate, says many of today's lawyer jokes are castoffs from a more politically incorrect era.

"The joke 'What do you call 5,000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A good start,' started off as a racist joke," he says.

"You can't make racist jokes anymore," he says. "But lawyers are still fair game."

It's a fact of life with which Virginia May has made her peace. "Someone will think nothing of telling you a bad lawyer joke at a party," says the well-respected veteran Calgary lawyer who immigrated to Calgary from England three decades ago.

"But as soon as that same person needs legal help, you're the first person they call."