When I began to study law, I soon became aware of its humour. What could be more laughable than the pompous and self-important judges preening themselves in their pantomime costumes? As the law, lawyers and the courts became my working life, I found that humour in various forms—cynical, mocking, affectionate or simply distracting—was a pervasive feature of legal culture. I hope it still is.
Legal humour has also long been a branch of popular literature, starting perhaps in the modern era with Dickens and Mrs Bardell’s action for breach of promise against Mr Pickwick, and the absurdly prolonged Jarndyce v Jarndyce in Bleak House, based on the real-life case of Thellusson v Woodford (1799) 4 Ves 227. Are young lawyers today familiar with the works of A.P. Herbert, or Beachcomber, or Henry Cecil, or, more recently, with the good-natured adventures of the late John Mortimer’s Horace Rumpole? I do not know of counterparts today.
