One of the better litigation practice tips I picked up somewhere, and now include in many of the continuing legal education courses I teach, is basically to figure out whether you are actually funny. If you’re not funny, that’s perfectly fine, most people aren’t; the real challenge is avoiding attempts to be overly funny in your briefs or oral arguments because it will go badly.
Of course, being funny is sort of like being good-looking: everyone wants to be funny, though most of us are objectively disqualified. Even Elon Musk, not satisfied with sometimes being the world’s richest man and being able to launch a car he made into space on a rocket ship he also made, spent $44 billion because he thought his bad jokes weren’t getting enough attention on Twitter. Musk also hosted “Saturday Night Live” to try to assert his comedic bona fides, to adequate effect.
Musk has many strengths, yet we can all see that doing standup just isn’t among them. He obviously has a lot of trouble accepting this.
You might want to be like Musk when you log into your banking app, but you do not want to be like him when it comes to desperately, furiously pursuing success in the one area it’s so obviously not going to happen in. It’s sad. This is among the many reasons I never once had aspirations of becoming a professional athlete.
You see a great many unfunny lawyers liberally sprinkling their careers with attempted jokes. Like with anything else, practice does make a person better at getting a laugh, and it’s certainly OK to hone your craft a bit while carefully steering well clear of Michael Scott territory.
Yet, there is one joke that almost every lawyer I’ve ever met uses, despite the fact that it only ever generates polite, fake laughter from listeners less powerful than the orator. If you yourself have uttered this abomination, fear not, all is forgiven: but now is the time to retire it permanently, remove it from your repertoire, and drive it out into the desert to dump it in a shallow, unmarked grave.
The setup starts when someone else says something vaguely technical or scientific. “Well, I went to law school because I’m bad at math,” responds a nearby lawyer or judge. Then everyone dies a little inside.
Stop it! Stop it now, ya hear? OK, for one thing, almost no legal practice area does not involve quite a bit of math. Family law? Have fun with those property division spreadsheets. General civil litigation? I’ll take your call when you’re done calculating the prejudgment interest. Bankruptcy? Give me a break, it’s arithmetic for days. Even criminal sentencing guidelines are one part math, two parts alchemy.
If you have a lawyer who is bad at math, you have a problem. This joke is equivalent to your dentist joking about not going to medical school because he is bad at anatomy — obviously that is still a huge f*cking red flag for a guy who is about to insert a drill into your head.
Plus, the bad at math joke makes people in our profession seem dumb and lazy, and we don’t need any extra help at that. Many lawyers happen to have excellent math skills. Some of us even think every non-negligent citizen in any line of work should be scientifically literate. According to Galileo’s frequently mangled quote, the Book of Nature is “written in mathematical language,” after all.
Finally, and perhaps most grievously, the joke simply isn’t funny anymore (if it ever was to begin with). I bet every person reading this has heard it at least a dozen times. What joke ever got funnier on the hundredth telling?
So, let the “I went to law school because I’m bad at math” joke die its long-overdue death. You can still be considered to have a good sense of humor if you just like to laugh at other people’s jokes rather than telling your own. Hell, you could even go really wild and say something original.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.