By John Elman, J.D., CLU

On bad days, our life insurance careers can seem like punishing pursuits. Let’s be honest, we know that when some prospects see us coming, they’re afraid we’ll draw a loaded application and shoot them.

Our business is a little crazy, but so are other fields. They, too, have their lighter moments. A friend is in property management and has collected messages from his tenants. These are some of my favorites:

“Is it alright to change my drawers in the kitchen?”

“The toilet is blocked, and we cannot bathe the children until it is cleared.”

“Our kitchen floor is very damp. We have two children and would like a third. Would you send someone over to do something about it?”

Hospital charts
A doctor friend of mine gave me a few gems from hospital charts:

“Patient has chest pain if she lies on her side for over a year.”

“Rectal exam revealed a normal sized thyroid.”

“Patient has two teenage children but no other abnormalities.”

“The patient has been depressed since she began seeing me in 1997.”

This one from the medical insurance field is a hoot: A man appears at the pearly gates and is asked what he did on earth. “I was president of an HMO,” he replied. The gatekeeper said, “OK, you may stay three days and then go to hell.”

False teeth and bean counters
It seems dentists are required to have a sense of humor because they cause pain for a living. One dentist I know has on his card: “Be true to your teeth, or they will be false to you.” Another one says, “Only floss the teeth you want to keep.”

School administrators, who see just about everything in their careers, receive some interesting excuses from parents for their children. It seems to me that maybe the parents should be in school, too.

“My son is under a doctor’s care and should not take P.E. today. Please execute him.”

“Please excuse Lawrence from P.E. for a few days. Yesterday he fell out of a tree and misplaced his hip.”

“Please excuse Lisa for being absent. She was sick, and I had her shot.”

In the accounting field, the jokes seem to be about typical accountant personalities or their opinions of IRS agents. For example, they (no, I haven’t figured out who “they” are, either) say an extroverted accountant is one who, while he’s talking to you, stares at your belt buckle rather than your shoes. Another is about an IRS agent who ordered a pizza. The pizza guy asked the agent if he wanted the pizza cut into eight pieces or 12. The IRS agent said, “Eight, I can’t eat 12.”

What’s funny to me is that the accountant who told me this joke actually thought it was funny.

Legal laughs
Lawyer humor can fill volumes, literally. There seem to be more jokes about lawyers than any other subject, and they are all hostile. I have a half-dozen books of nothing but lawyer jokes. They are funny to everyone—except lawyers.

For instance, they say that the post office had to recall its series of stamps depicting famous lawyers. People were confused as to which side to spit on. And if lawyers are supposed to be precise communicators, consider this exchange.

Defense Attorney: “There’s a good chance your sentence will be reversed.”

Defendant: “That’s great!”

Defense Attorney: “Instead of life, you may get death.”

Sophisticated humor
I recently attended the annual conference of the International Society for Humor Studies. This is an international group of scholars who study humor from the standpoint of psychology, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and linguistics—to mention just a few of the fields represented.

One of the attendees, Victor Raskin, a world-renowned linguistics professor who studies humor, believes that the funniest jokes are the more sophisticated ones.

“Laughing at sophisticated humor” he says, “takes work and understanding to find all the inferences and less obvious funny possibilities.”

As always, I urge you to look for laughter every day. I’m talking about observing, remembering and looking all around you with laughter in mind. It takes effort, but studies show you can live longer and better by finding more joyous, mirthful laughter.

John Elman, J.D., CLU, is a senior agent with Northwestern Mutual. Studying humor and laughter is his lifelong hobby. His address: 2600 El Camino Real, #318, Palo Alto, CA 94306.

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