Informant: What do you call twenty skydiving lawyers?

Me: I don’t know. What?

Informant: Skeet.

The informant (my dad) is a particularly self-deprecating lawyer. While he does take pride in his work, he often admits that he only went to law school because his father had been a lawyer, and the informant had “no idea what to do with [his] life” after he graduated from college. The informant currently works at a law firm in San Francisco (he recently changed firms, after his former firm became too large and very corrupt. I suspect the series of lawyer jokes he told me were told with some of his old colleagues in mind.) This joke was told to my family over the dinner table, and was very much enjoyed by my mom (also an attorney).

This joke, of course, plays on the negative stereotypes surrounding lawyers. Nobody really likes lawyers; at least, nobody trusts them. Skeet, for those who are unfamiliar, is a recreational and often competitive form of shooting. Participants use shotguns to take down clay disks (or “clay pigeons”). The informant, despite having many lawyer jokes in his arsenal, is especially fond of this one, and likes to end the performance of it by pantomiming the act of aiming a shotgun at the sky and then making a pt, pt, pt sound (shooting) followed by mock wailing (from the lawyers).