Joking

Jane's last day of school is today. She is the social one, if not interested in study. She arranged a get-together with some of her classmates (again it's here this year..more work for dad....sigh) after school. They went go bowling and swam here afterward. It's nice that they are old enough to be on their own some of the time, without supervision.
Heard and funny jokes today? I go out of my way to read or hear them because I think jokes are particularly important to our mental health (You are probably laughing at the thought of me being mentally healthy...but I am not joking....I think). I thought about this and am bombarding you with it today after seeing yet another lawyer joke. Lawyer jokes may be one of the more common subjects for humor, but I'll write more about that later.
I think humor is as important to us as any other "feeling" we search for in life. The father of the protestant religions, theologian Martin Luther, once wrote that "If I am not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don't want to go there." I can't argue with that sentiment and hope Luther is chuckling up above right now. I find that there are some general categories of jokes we tell and hear, all classified as either "dirty" or "clean". Among them are jokes involving things that are geared to: political, sexual, medical, children, foreign, sports, animals, religion, technology, business, blondes, insults, entertainment, men and women, the news, and lawyers.
Ok, there are more categories, but those are the ones I can think at the moment as being most common joke subjects. And of all of them the subject of lawyer jokes is most interesting to me. For why do we all love them so much. Even lawyers tell them, and often lawyer jokes never become stale. Lawyer bashing is a particular favorite form of humor in the U.S. There must be at least 500 of them circulating around the internet (look below for some of them) in which lawyers are portrayed as greedy, sneaky and deceptive. And we believe they are! Well, we believe that until we need one for our own cause.
Maybe we like those jokes because we can use lawyers as the scapegoats for things gone wrong in our over- regulated and too legalized world. I think we also like to ridicule lawyers because they have so much power in society. Just as a politician is the butt of our rage, so are the lawyers. And though I do not really want to "first shoot the lawyers" as Shakespeare wrote, I do want to shoot jokes at those lawyers that will cut them down to size. So what do you think? Are the lawyer jokes funny or excessive?