an attorney walks into a bar joke

Hi. My name is Steve. I am a recovering attorney.

Some attorneys see retirement as a transitional period. They taper off on their schedule, but show up for work every day -- until they leave feet first one afternoon.

That was not my idea of retirement. When I headed south to Mexico, I left my law career standing on Summer Street in front of my Salem house. The last I saw it, it was waving at me in my rear view mirror.

I did not quit the bar entirely. The next January I elected to move from active to inactive status. I was not quite ready to hit the "resign" button. Because you never never know, do you? I am the equivalent of an alcoholic who stills gets some pleasure out of reading single malt scotch labels.

In return for just a bit over one hundred dollars each year, the Oregon State Bar sends me hectoring emails that remind me why I am no longer an attorney.  It is as if my former profession has installed the latest version of King George III.2 software. A lot of what is haywire with American society is amplified by my former colleagues -- or the colleagues that make up the bar leadership.

But, I do receive something valuable for my money. Every month, I find the bar's Bulletin in my mailbox. (Yes, it still comes in hard copy. Attorneys are not the most cutting-edge of professions.)

The magazine is stuffed with the usual self-righteous and narcissistic filler that graces every professional publication. But there is one column that has long been my favorite, and it makes the rest of the dross bearable.

Suzanne E. Rowe offers advice on how attorneys can improve their writing skills in the not-very-imaginative, but highly-practical-titled "The Legal Writer." Her columns are always filled with the type of advice that a large group of attorneys, some of the world's most dreadful writers, should take to heart.

I still read the column because I am a grammar groupie. Her columns are always pithy and witty -- just as a column about improving writing should be.

I have a second reason for reading the column. A couple of years ago, I met Salvador (or "Chava" as common usage would have it), a young Mexican with very good English skills. But he wanted to improve it. His interest is in tourism, and English is a prized asset in the field.

I do not remember why I started giving him Suzanne's column, but it was exactly what he had been looking for. She answered some of the questions that his English instructor could not. The column became the center of our weekly meetings.

The rule during our meetings is that Chava can speak only English, and I can speak only Spanish. He has the better end of the deal.

When I received Suzanne's most recent column, I knew Chava would love it. Not only was it filled with grammar tips, it was about jokes. And he loves jokes even more than I do.

There was one problem. The concept was based entirely on "a guy walks into a bar" jokes. Chava had never heard of them. Missing the setup in a joke is certain doom for the punchline. Or, as that master jokester Johnny Carson put it: "If you buy the premise, you buy the bit."

It took me only a minute or two in fractured Spanish to explain the idea of "a guy walks into a bar" jokes, and he was ready for Suzanne's rules of grammars wrapped in humor. He laughed so hard while reading the list, I was almost envious of his understanding.

Here they are:

An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television getting drunk and smoking cigars.

Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.

An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.

A bar was walked into by the passive voice.

A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.

A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.

A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.

A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a short, dark and handsome sentence fragment.

Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.

From our earlier conversations, he knew most of the grammar terms. On only two of the jokes did he have questions. Where I struggled was trying to remember the Spanish words for some of the grammar terms. Fortunately, like most things grammar, Latin is our friend. Most of the terms are cognates. The trick, for me, is remembering where the accents fall. (Yes, I know. Usually te second to last syllable. But the trick is the difference between remembering and doing.)

At my last employer, I was part of a team that conducted quarterly legal training for our staff. We quickly learned that humor was our best tool. (It was also our worst potential enemy. Almost anything we laugh at these days has the potential to dynamite open a bevy of hurt lockers.)

When Chava was getting ready to leave, I asked him if he would put together a similar list of grammar jokes in Spanish. He asked for a month to do that. After all, I simply used someone else's jokes for our little exercise. That sounded fair to me.

I saw him today on my morning walk. He had shown the column to his English teacher. He beamed when he told me his teacher had understood only one of the jokes. Smug would not have described his smile.

And who says all those years of getting a law degree was wasted time?