legal humor

I have had some requests from my readers (all three of them) for some more vignettes of law school humor. I guess reading about the law alone lacks the laughable, and I don't mean that in a humorously sarcastic way. Unlike, say, the study of literature, the law lacks a sense of humor. Sure, there are plenty of lawyer jokes and I know there can sometimes be a humorous moment at trials, but the law itself is almost completely lacking in humor. Sure, if you read certain case law, written by certain judges, you will find a humorous line (like the opening line from
Frigaliment: "This issue is, what is chicken?," which is really only funny until you realize that that is the issue the court must decide.) There are also humorous situations that you find in the case law, but this is a pretty dark humor like the case of Webb v. McGowen, where McGowen, seeing that a large plank was about to fall on top of his boss Webb, somehow dives from the upper level in such a way to prevent the plank from falling on Webb but causing serious injury to himself. Outside of humorous lines and humorous situations, however, the law has no room for humor, and this seems to be based on the fact that those who practice/ create/ follow law take it seriously. Laws themselves are not funny. The supreme court does not decide one way or another because they want to amuse the parties and leave the lower courts doubled over in laughter when they read the cases for precedent. When law is made, it is made to be taken seriously, and this is what separates it from other literary disciplines. Philosophy has fully accepted humor, which can be seen in the Derridian sense of play and deconstruction, even Shakespeare's comedies were about some universal truths, and one of my favorite writers, Tom Robbins, regularly employs humor as a means to disarm the mind from its rationalistic mechanisms, opening it up to the potential for new and fresh ways of seeing the world.

The law is a curmudgeony old man and does not like sudden insights, flashes of new ideas, and a sense of play. The law is about battles, about two sides arguing their points with the goal of winning. The law itself, cases and statutes, cares little for the individual parties, for the same reason that it abhors sudden flashes of genius: the law shouldn't just apply to one case (unless we are talking individual contracts) but rather is a system of evolving standards, of a constant against which future parties can adjust their behavior, and other judges can rule on the behavior of these parties. The whole concept of stare decisis is in place to prevent the sudden swinging back and forth of rules that would result if every conflict was tried on a case by case basis, but humor on the other hand thrives on the sudden surprise, the flash of unexpected, and the purposeful throwing oneself of balance for the sake of deep cathartic release.

With this in mind, you must imagine the type of people that are attracted to law school (there are always exceptions that prove the rule.) People take the law very seriously and a lot of young lawyers (and I am assuming this will be the case as I progress through this career) take themselves seriously. The worst part about the end of the semester just around the corner is that I will have to listen to a bunch of people who take themselves too seriously repeat such phrases as "I am going to fail," "I can't forget that I am being compared with everyone else" and "I am sure practice will be nothing like this." This is not funny, and I know as much as everyone else that grades are important, but only so long as you learn to think, and along with learning to think comes the capacity to step back and not take what you think so seriously, to give it some room to breath, and when that is all said and done, then it seems we can accept the seriousness of the law without sacrificing the fluidity and freedom of though upon which the system of common law is based. (but who is really thinking about whether the law has a sense of humor? just me. you won't find this discussion in the cases books, or in a study guide. maybe it is my previous training in literary theory that cases me to want to know how the law fits into the larger scale of human consciousness or the fact that I have always been more of a big picture kind of thinker rather than a detail oriented mind, and I am trying to fit that way of thinking into the world of legal thought, which is so obsessively focused on the details. )

This post is decidedly not very humorous, and maybe that is a sign that law school is slowly eating away at my sense of humor ( you ever notice that it is mostly non-lawyers who tell lawyer jokes). I should go back and read about our friend McGowen and make a sudden and seemingly impossible leap in order to save humor from lawschool.