by Harold Scheub (Author)

What do you call 600 lawyers at the bottom of the sea? Marc Galanter calls it an opportunity to investigate the meanings of a rich and time-honored genre of American humor: lawyer jokes. Lowering the Bar analyzes hundreds of jokes from Mark Twain classics to contemporary anecdotes about Dan Quayle, Johnnie Cochran, and Kenneth Starr. Drawing on representations of law and lawyers in the mass media, political discourse, and public opinion surveys, Galanter finds that the increasing reliance on law has coexisted uneasily with anxiety about the legalization of society. Informative and always entertaining, his book explores the tensions between Americans deep-seated belief in the law and their ambivalence about lawyers."

Author Biography

Harold Scheub is the Evjue-Bascom Professor of Humanities in the Department of African Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of many books, including Story; The Tongue Is Fire: South African Storytellers and Apartheid; and editor of The World and the Word, all published by the University of Wisconsin Press.