In his Foreword to Judges, Judging and Humour, former Justice of the High Court of Australia Michael Kirby reflects upon his varied experiences of judicial humour over decades working in courtrooms. One anecdote of an unnamed judge brings to the fore the complexities of judicial humour in form and function – complexities that this outstanding collection deftly explores:
He was a brilliant after-dinner speaker. Much of his humour was sardonic. He revelled in his deliberate political incorrectness. For decades it drew great crowds and thunderous applause. However, when this judge told his joke about “hairy legged lesbians” once too often, the laughter turned to ashes in his mouth. His put-downs and insults came to be seen as needlessly cruel. New generations came to see them as inappropriate to the holder of a judicial office. (viii)
Just as an Australian reader can readily recognise the unnamed judge in this anecdote, humour relies greatly upon contextual knowledge. As the collection illustrates, humour reinforces social connections and shared values, all dependent on time, place and cultural coincidences. Kirby's anecdote also demonstrates the pitfalls inherent in a misreading of that context and one's audience. What may be thought to be appropriate in an after-dinner speech in the 1990s may not be tolerated in different contexts. The shift to which Kirby refers reflects these changing expectations and changing audiences — from a predominantly male elite to a more diverse legal profession. Whether a speaker is conscious of this shift and modifies his or her behaviour accordingly reflects a deeper understanding of self and what it means to be a judge. A misjudgement on the appropriateness of humour can, in turn, raise questions regarding the underlying values and preconceptions held by the speaker, leading, in the case of a judge, to concerns regarding judicial bias, and fitness for office. Examples of this pepper Galanter's discussion of “Funny Judges” in his exploration of humour about judges in the United States in Chapter 3 of the collection.
The inherent nuance surrounding humour, and the fine lines involved in determining what makes a remark humorous in different contexts, has minded many judicial officers to issue warnings regarding its use.Footnote 1 However, as the collection expertly illustrates, humour can have multiple purposes in legal contexts, including beneficial purposes such as managing courtroom workloads and diffusing tension (see, eg Blix and Wettergren's discussion in Chapter 6 of humour in Swedish courts). This should be no surprise. In addition to their role as theatres of justice, courtrooms are social environments, and court officers, including judges, humans interacting in social spaces, as the two chapters co-authored by Roach Anleu skilfully demonstrate (see Chapters 1, 5).
This collection embraces the complexities inherent in a study of humour and courts, offering significant fresh insights into the role of these interactions. A key strength of the collection is its expansive methodology: its three parts spanning research from four continents, and a range of interdisciplinary approaches. Part 2's authors most directly explore the challenges illustrated by Kirby's anecdote: how judges use humour. In addition to the exploration of the varied purposes of humour deployed by judges in Australia and Sweden in Chapters 5 and 6, Moran's examination of swearing-in ceremonies in the UK in Chapter 7 offers an important exploration of the gendered dimension of courtroom humour. Moran's chapter also underlines the historical and source-contingent nature of academic examinations of humour – the impact of the eponymous “Bakewell tart” in the ceremony was observed by Moran, whereas future generations would rely, at best, on written transcripts or newspaper reporting. In these ways Moran's contribution raises both the gender questions, and methodological challenges, that underpin the materials explored in other chapters in the collection.
Part 1 has as its focus humour about judges. Davis's chapter (Chapter 2) is an important precursor to the later chapters, as she explores the ways in which jokes, anecdotes and witticism are differentially framed by the contextual knowledge of the audience, and the consequent impact on the capacity for later academic examination of humour. Davis, and then Galanter in the following chapter, emphasises that the absence of jokes about judges is a reflection of the broader societal status they hold in the UK (Davis, Chapter 2) and US (Galanter, Chapter 3), and the positive values that the role of judge embodies. These conclusions align with Milner Davis's analysis of humour in the European theatre in Chapter 4. Through her fascinating discussion of stage and screen portrayals of “the judge”, Milner Davis observes that the “the joke of the comic judge turns on how judicial power ought to be exercised”, and that the portrayals elicit laughter “not in disrespect, but ruefully, at what should be the case”. (130, emphasis added).
Part 3 of the collection shifts to examining the impact of courts on humour, through the explorations by Capelotti (Chapter 8) and Little (Chapter 9) of Brazilian and American case law respectively. Given the complexity and ambiguity of humour illustrated throughout the preceding chapters, and the urgency of debates regarding the metes and bounds of free speech in a Twitter-happy world, these chapters reinforce the global significance of scholarship that interrogates how judges understand humour.
The collection's first chapter, authored by the editors Jessica Milner Davis and Sharyn Roach Anleu, expertly introduces all of these themes and methodological questions. As the editors indicate, the emerging field of law and humour offers rich potential for law and society scholars, with its inherent interdisciplinary methodologies drawing upon the humanities, social sciences, and law, and engaging empirical, doctrinal, textual, and narrative and interpretative methods. In its canvassing of the relevant literature and methodological complexities attending this important topic, this chapter alone is worth the price of the book, and should be the starting point for any law and society scholars (re)engaging with the multi-faceted connections between law and humour studies.
