Laugh (at a lawyer) and the world laughs with you

Updated April 2025

In the old days, Australians prided themselves on having a great sense of humour, and everyone and everything was fair game for a joke.

In those innocent days – before political correctness woke us up – you could make gentle fun of women drivers, the Scottish, blondes, clergymen, actresses, and anyone else you could think-of.

Nowadays you wouldn’t dare marginalise or ‘attack’ any person or group that could claim to be victimised/traumatised/harassed by your insensitivity.

Nowadays, we cannot tell ‘blonde’ jokes as these unfairly stereotype people as unintelligent based upon their choice of hair-pigment.

We cannot tell ‘Scottish’ jokes as these unjustly stigmatise an entire nationality as ungenerous.

Anything to do with sexuality, gender-identification, body-shape, race, ethnicity or religious views is apparently out of bounds.

People have lost their jobs over this sort of thing. Even professional comedians get into major trouble if their jokes don’t ‘land’.

Getting ‘cancelled’ is a real and serious concern for all those rugged individualists who are determined to speak their minds.

In this age of political correctness, it seems that humour is a dangerous occupation. Each joke must be carefully scrutinised for potential offence to some minority group, and then sanitised of any disrespect to anyone whose delicate sensibilities might be burdened with the weight of somebody laughing at their expense.

Social media seems filled with humourless people who aren’t happy unless they are fired-up and ranting against somebody for some perceived slight or ‘tone-deaf’ comment.

As a result, what used to pass for harmless fun is now seen as social activism. Everyone must be a ‘role-model’ at all times, and everything is a ‘learning-moment’.

Luckily there is still one group that we are able to make fun-of. Lawyers. Everyone likes a good lawyer joke. Lawyers are one of the last groups that remains fair-game for all.

People often don’t trust lawyers. They may have had a bad experience, friends or business associates may have shared their bad experiences, or decades of TV shows depicting lawyers as liars and cheats might have indoctrinated them.

So as a society we often expect the worst from lawyers. Among other things, we expect them as a group to be less than transparent about the value of their services and their strengths and limitations. They expect them to charge top dollar for services we don’t need or could get elsewhere for a lot less. We tend to look at them as a group through the lens of suspicion and mistrust.

It seems we lawyers are tough enough to withstand a bit of fun being poked at us without marching on parliament to protest about it. Everyone from Shakespeare to John Stewart has scored a laugh from lawyer jokes. And that’s fine with me. We can take the hit. In fact that’s partly what we’re here for. To take some of the blows on behalf of our clients. Despite numerous government’s best efforts, lawyers aren’t quite yet a vulnerable species, and generally-speaking we can stick up for ourselves.

We can all laugh at an amorphous group, because they are faceless. It’s not personal. So we tell jokes against lawyers as a generalisation, to prick their pomposity, rail against their fees and generally bring them down a notch – you know, to teach them some humility. But here’s an interesting observation: when asked about their own lawyer as an individual, most people will say that (s)he is a good person who really helped them when they were most needed. In other words, although lawyers overall suck, my lawyer is the exception.

So I’m OK if a joke or two is thrown at my profession – hopefully they’re actually funny rather than just gratuitously insulting. If you’ve got a good lawyer joke to share, please send it in – nowadays we could all do with a bit of a laugh.

Here’s one to get you started:

You Can’t Take it with You

A wealthy old skinflint named Peregrine knew he was dying. He had never married, as he couldn’t bear the idea of sharing anything with anyone. He had no heirs. He loathed paying tax so much that he would have to be sedated after his substantial tax assessment notice arrived each year.

He loved his money and wanted to find a way to take his considerable wealth with him into the next life. He therefore sold everything he owned and converted it all to cash – exactly $3million.

He called for the three men he trusted most – his lawyer, his doctor, and his clergyman. He told them, “I’m going to give you each $1million in cash before I die. That way the government cannot tax my estate with death duties after I am gone, because my estate will have nothing in it. I have pre-paid my funeral, and ordered a double-size deluxe casket (normally used for a husband and wife being interred together). At my funeral, I want you to place the money in my coffin so that I can try to take it with me.”

All three agreed to do this and were given the money.

At the funeral, each approached the coffin in turn and placed a box inside. While riding in the limousine away from the cemetery, the clergyman said “I have to confess something to you fellows. Brother Peregrine was not a particularly good man in his life, but I believe that he would have wanted me to do this. The church needed a new outreach centre very badly, and I took $400,000 of the money he gave me and bought one. I only put $600,000 in the casket.”

The physician then said, “Well, since we’re confiding in one another, I might as well tell you that I didn’t put the full $1million in the casket either. Peregrine had a disease that could have been diagnosed sooner if the hospital had this new machine, but the machine cost $700,000 and I used his money to buy the machine so that we might be able to save another patient. I only put $300,000 into the casket. I think that Peregrine would have wanted me to do that.”

The lawyer then said, “I’m surprised at both of you. When I put my box into that casket, it held my personal cheque for the full $1million.”

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