No surprise, I’m a fan of humor. One of my most reliable defense mechanisms to life’s dark moments is to find humor in the situation. I’m also a big proponent of using humor in the arena of public speaking, although I’ve written about the risks of doing so. (See Andrew J. McClurg, The Risks of Being Funny, GPSolo, Apr. 2003, at 60.)
Humor in a court proceeding, however, is a different ballgame. Starting out my career as a law clerk to a federal district judge, I saw humor, usually unplanned and spontaneous, work well in court on several occasions. But in an excellent ABA Journal article, Texas attorney John G. Browning makes a strong case for avoiding any effort to be funny in court, primarily by discussing a number of cringeworthy examples from real cases.
Such as when attorney Jay Floyd, arguing to defend Texas’s abortion laws before the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, made the decision to begin his oral argument with: “It’s an old joke, but when a man argues against two beautiful ladies like this, they are going to have the last word.” Browning recounts that, not surprisingly, this “tone-deaf and sexist attempt at humor was met with an extended painful silence from the justices.”
Browning’s article is highly recommended reading.
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