A quick historical legal ‘joke’, or passage of what was seen as witty dialogue, anyway, from a 1915 edition of Y Dinesydd Cymraeg: my mental warm-up translation this morning …
A hard-headed judge
Judge: Was the stone you threw bigger than my head?
The prisoner: Yes, your honour, but not quite as hard!
How those Welsh citizens must have laughed! Possibly proving that humour does not really translate, across the language/time continuum. I do find myself fascinated, though, by the wise-cracking judicial persona that comes out in these things, and can’t help but see connections with some of the ‘humour’ I found some years ago, when researching an article on jokes and wordplay in medieval common law reports.
16/1/2024
Keeping them laughing … or possibly not
And here is another piece of proof that legal humour does not really travel, from an issue of Tarian y Gweithiwr from 1887.
The judge and the constable
Judge: What sort of man did you see committing the assault?
Constable: For certain, your lordship, he was some foolish little creature – about your size, your lordship’.
This time, I suppose that the humour is working on an assumption that lawyers are weedy and policemen burly and not very diplomatic …which makes more sense when we reflect that ‘Tarian y Gweithiwr’ was explicitly targeting ‘gweithwyr’, i.e. labourers.
You want more court-room humour from Welsh newspapers? Oh, very well.
Here we are, loosely translated from a Tarian y Gweithiwr from 1886: a side-splitting dialogue between a judge and a witness …
The judge asked the witness if he understood the meaning of the oath he had taken. “Yes, sir”, answered the witness, “I am sworn to tell the truth”. “What would happen”, asked the judge then, “if you did not tell the truth?”. “Well, I suppose”, said the witness, “our side would win the case”.
Ho ho!
And, since everybody loves an amusing, animal-related, incident in court, what about this, from an 1897 Gwalia?
In the quarter sessions in New Ross, presided over by Judge Kane, there was an exciting and very peculiar incident. A tom cat of dignified appearance made an appearance in the court, and, chased from one place to another by some people, he jumped onto the [witness box].[i] Whilst gliding lightly over the papers and black bags of the solicitors, one of the men of law threw a thick volume on the Land Acts at the animal, but the cat was too quick for the lawyer, and, like a flash, jumped onto the bench beside the judge. With fire in his eyes, he jumped for the wig on the judge’s head. His Honour, somehow, managed to dodge him, and the cat fell down. The judge took the matter in the best possible humour, while the lawyers and the public laughed heartily.
[i] Or ‘table’.
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash