Old Lady Lawyer: What Is An SOH?
Have a good lawyer joke? Columnist Jill Switzer would like to hear it.
In dinosaur days — those days before the Internet ruled our lives, both for good and for not so good — one way to possibly find a date, a relationship, or even marriage, was to peruse the personal ads. Major newspapers, including but not limited to the Los Angeles Times, printed scads of them. They were a hoot to read. In fact, my former boss found his partner and then spouse that way.
Almost every ad contained the words “must have SOH,” or some variation of that. A sense of humor was seen as any prospect’s “must have.” I’ve always thought that, as a group, lawyers are particularly humorless when it comes to jokes, especially lawyer jokes. That may be true for all professionals who are the targets of jokes in their particular professions, but lawyers seem to be more susceptible and less able to roll with the punches that such jokes deliver.
In the early 1990s, and I am not making this up, the State Bar of California had a campaign to try to stop the proliferation of lawyer jokes, which to no one’s surprise was a big fat fiasco and created a public relations nightmare. What had prompted the then-president of the State Bar of California, Harvey Saferstein, to call for the laying off of lawyer jokes had a legitimate, tragic basis in fact: the mass shooting at the law office of Pettit & Martin in San Francisco, in which eight people were killed and six injured. However, calling for such a moratorium created a backlash that led to exactly the opposite effect than what Saferstein had intended: more lawyer jokes, not less.
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Another state bar president a decade or so later took the opposite approach and told members of the Minnesota bar to lighten up, to be less defensive. Taking his advice to heart, one Minneapolis law firm actually has a lawyer humor section on its website.
It’s a good thing that Google and other search engines weren’t around in the 1990s; otherwise, the State Bar of California would have had an even harder time swatting off the myriad of critics about this doomed campaign. Today, all you have to do is type “lawyer jokes” in any search engine and….ta-da….they are everywhere.
Why are we such targets for these jokes? Do we walk around with bull’s-eyes on whatever part of our anatomy they may be pinned upon? The work we do ranges from literally life and death to the inane, and it’s the inane that seems to get the attention of the media, comedians, and others who pound the profession mercilessly. (Yes, that includes this website, which is Exhibit 1 for deflating pomposity that seems to run rampant among us.)
While the attorney of the “No Soup for You” claim decided not to sue, the fact is that the kerfuffle created by his demand letter only provided more fodder for comedy at lawyers’ expense. Making a demand about the failure to provide a cup of soup and then adding attorney’s fees on top of it? Really? No wonder we are often the laughingstock. Well-deserved for antics like these.
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Legal work is serious work and we should and do take the work seriously. However, the problem arises when we confuse the work that we do with how we view ourselves. We should take the work seriously, but not ourselves seriously, and this is precisely where I think we stumble in the world of public opinion. Do we even have a sense of humor?
One blog post from some years back posed the question as one of the chicken and the egg: does a legal education rob law students of their senses of humor, or do only people with no sense of humor go to law school? Your thoughts?
The writer includes some bits about actual questions asked and answers given in court. Read through one or more of the books on this topic (affiliate links). Not only are they screamingly funny, they are primers for lawyers to stifle themselves from asking the bone-headed questions in depositions or in trial that these lawyers asked.
We are never, ever going to reduce, let alone squelch, lawyer jokes. So, why can’t we relax a little about our own personalities, cut ourselves a little slack, and portray ourselves as other than money-grubbing, exorbitant fee-charging professionals (I could use a number of other terms here), which is the way the world at large seems to regard us? I’ve never heard us swap lawyer jokes at cocktail parties, networking events, or any other place where lawyers congregate. Why not? Why do we have an inability to laugh at ourselves, our foibles, our weaknesses? We have them, some more than others.
Some months ago, I wrote a column about another kind of law school admission test. I neglected to add one more trait that I think is essential to a successful legal career, and that is a sense of humor. Sometimes things happen that are so unbelievably silly, mind-blowingly stupid, or both, or there’s the file from hell (e.g., every time you open it, trouble awaits). Having a sense of humor is thus a necessity, not a luxury.
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We probably do have senses of humor, just more unintentional than not. If you have any doubt about how funny we appear to non-lawyers, watch Chico and Groucho Marx negotiating a contract. (If you’re a millennial and unfamiliar with the Marx Brothers, you need to get acquainted.)
We should lighten up, show that “lawyer with a sense of humor” is not an oxymoron, and not be so defensive about lawyer jokes. They’re here to stay, long after the youngest who is reading this is taking a dirt nap. If you do have a sense of humor and want to share it, then please email me with your favorite lawyer jokes and I’ll print some of them in a future column. Given all the present and future changes confronting the profession, we all need a good laugh.
Jill Switzer is closing in on 40 (not a typo) years as a active member of the State Bar of California. Yes, folks, California, that state west of the Sierra Nevada, which everyone likes to diss. She’s had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see old lawyers, young lawyers, and those in-between interact — it’s not always pretty. You can reach her by email at oldladylawyer@gmail.com.
