This post is part one of a series.

I can’t be the only one to have noticed that members of certain professions have become the targets of a disproportionate number of jokes. Certainly, all occupations cultivate their own strains of humor, but certain career paths seem to have spawned much more than the average. Ask someone walking down the street if they’ve heard a good joke about warehouse workers, and you would most likely get a blank stare. Ask the same individual if he or she knows any lawyer jokes, and you will probably hear at least one, if not several. But why should this be?

Giving the topic some thought, I’ve come up with six reasons that might explain such a phenomenon. These include the law profession’s familiarity, necessity, impact, adversarial nature, ethical complexity, and comparatively high status.

Lawyers don’t exactly work in obscurity. The profession is familiar to almost everyone, and many of us have at least one within our extended family or circle of friends. Most advertise their services, try to stand out while networking in various social assemblages, and have plenty of interesting stories they can tell, albeit with some restrictions necessitated by dictates of confidentiality. This secrecy, fortunately, doesn’t preclude our familiarity by other means. For various reasons (many related to our current topic), lawyers have long been leading characters, in literature, in theater, and more recently in television and cinema.

The Mutual Vulnerability Theory (Simon and........

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