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Funny Judges: Judges as Humorous, Judges as Humourists

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Judges, Judging and Humour

Abstract

There are far fewer jokes about judges in circulation in the United States than there are jokes about lawyers. Unlike the generally critical tone of lawyer jokes, American jokes about judges reveal an idealised portrait of the judge, exhibiting a specificity and detail that is unusual (or absent) in jokes about other occupational, professional, or governmental roles. The jokes reveal a detailed set of expectations about judges by portraying instances of violation of those ideals. I surmise that, to a considerable extent, it is the judges themselves along with others in the professional legal community who are the producers, tellers and audience for these jokes. It remains to be seen whether and how the changing role of real-life judges will be reflected in the corpus of jokes about judges.

An earlier version of this chapter was delivered in a plenary session on Judicial Humor at the International Society of Humor Studies Conference, Holy Names University, Oakland, California, 29 June 2015.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Children’s use of joking and humour has been studied and documented, for example in the British context by noted folklorists of children’s rhymes, Peter and Iona Opie, in their collection The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959). Many of the variants that follow here are listed by the Opies and also are found in Australia: see for example: http://www.odps.org/glossword/index.php?a=term&d=3&t=700 (accessed 30 April 2017).

  2. 2.

    This version also appears in Saul Bellow’s 1953 novel The Adventures of Augie March (New York: Viking Press).

  3. 3.

    This version is identified as coming from the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1960s.

  4. 4.

    A contributor, Steve Wilson, explains that this was part of a game in which the object was “to get one of the other players to smile or laugh or talk, who then becomes the monkey” (De Koven 2013, Comment No. 2, posted on 3 July at 9.29 a.m. At: http://www.worldlaughtertour.com/ Accessed 18 April 2018).

  5. 5.

    For an account of the centuries-old judge figure on the comic stage and some discussion of Judge Judy, see Chap. 4.

  6. 6.

    For an admiring account of the use of jokes by Alex Kozinsky, a prominent judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, see Golden (1992). In 2017, after 32 years on the bench, he resigned in response to accusations by former clerks of sexual harassment.

  7. 7.

    Christie Davies’s extended study of folklore joke collections establishes that stock targets are likely to be situated on the social periphery of the society (Davies 2001).

  8. 8.

    Collected on 11 November 2005 from William Passanante of the New York bar, who reported hearing it told not long before by a federal judge in Oregon.

  9. 9.

    This joke appears to have entered judicial humour folklore in other locations. See, eg, Fine (2017), who reports Justice Russell Brown of the Supreme Court of Canada told the joke in the setting of the Canadian judicial system.

  10. 10.

    Medical State of Mind (2013).

  11. 11.

    A Google search on 10 May 2015 for “jokes about lawyers” produced 80,700 hits, and for “jokes about judges”, 51,900. However, many of the jokes that are presented as judge jokes are stories in which a judge is part of the set-up but where the actual joke figure is a lawyer or party. A better indicator of their relative presence was a more targeted search: “told a lawyer joke” produced 1310 hits but “told a judge joke” had zero hits. And “joke about a judge” had five hits while “joke about a lawyer” had 21 hits.

  12. 12.

    This explosion is described in detail in Galanter (2005).

  13. 13.

    In a late 2013 Gallup poll some 45 per cent of respondents rated judges high or very high on honesty and ethical standards. Only 20 per cent gave such ratings to lawyers. Judges’ ratings were comparable to those of college teachers and clergy, while lawyers’ were comparable to stockbrokers and business executives, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1654/honesty-ethics-professions.aspx (accessed 19 June 2018).

  14. 14.

    There are also no (or few) judge jokes corresponding to those jokes I classify as “Objects of Scorn”.

  15. 15.

    See Galanter (2005: 214) for the history of this joke.

  16. 16.

    To Kill a Mockingbird was one of the most widely-read books in the United States in the late twentieth century. Atticus Finch remains an emblematic figure for many American lawyers (see Galanter 2005: 6–7).

  17. 17.

    Mason was the hero of the popular 1957–1966 CBS television series of the same name based on an earlier set of novels by Erle Stanley Gardner (1889–1970).

  18. 18.

    Holmes served on the US Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932 after serving as Justice and then Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts from 1882 to 1902.

  19. 19.

    Bean was celebrated in a 39-episode television series launched in 1956 and was played by a young Paul Newman in a 1972 film, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean.

  20. 20.

    The one exception that I have encountered is a fable presented by American satirist Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914). Whether or not it is based on any story actually in circulation seems doubtful, as there is no trace of it before or since. It runs: “An Associate Justice of the Supreme Court was sitting by a river when a traveller approached and said: ‘I wish to cross. Will it be lawful to use this boat?’ ‘It will,’ was the reply: ‘it is my boat.’ The traveler thanked him, and pushing the boat into the water embarked and rowed away. But the boat sank and the traveler was drowned. ‘Heartless man!’ said an indignant spectator. ‘Why did you not tell him that your boat had a hole in it?’ ‘The matter of the boat’s condition,’ said the great jurist, ‘was not brought before me.’” (Bierce 1911: 294) On Bierce’s views of lawyers and judges, see Hylton (1991).

  21. 21.

    Director, Peter Hyams.

  22. 22.

    Learned Hand (1872–1961) was appointed a Federal District Judge in 1909, elevated to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 1924, took senior status in 1951 and served until shortly before his death.

  23. 23.

    Dozens of versions of this story, going back to 1926, have been collected and analysed by an American law professor (Herz 1996).

  24. 24.

    Judges are, apart from military and quasi-military (police), the only government officials with a distinctive dress that denotes not subservience but separation. US judges do not wear wigs and wear less elaborate gowns than British judges, who, incidentally, do not use the gavel.

  25. 25.

    Similarly, lawyer jokes in England attach mainly to barristers, with their special regalia and ceremonial presence, and not to office-bound solicitors in business attire.

  26. 26.

    A revealing survey of such administrative tribunals is Kritzer (2013).

  27. 27.

    A few years later these courts had a backlog of over half a million cases (Laird 2017).

  28. 28.

    A pair of highly qualified observers guesstimated that in 2001 four federal agencies had a total of approximately 700,000 “evidentiary proceedings”, about seven times the total of such proceedings in the federal courts (Resnik and Curtis 2011: 317).

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  1. Department of Law, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA

    Marc Galanter

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  1. Marc Galanter
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Correspondence to Marc Galanter .

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  1. School of Literature, Arts and Media, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Jessica Milner Davis

  2. College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Sharyn Roach Anleu

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Galanter, M. (2018). Funny Judges: Judges as Humorous, Judges as Humourists. In: Milner Davis, J., Roach Anleu, S. (eds) Judges, Judging and Humour. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76738-3_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76738-3_3

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

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