Editorial

Citation

Evans, S. (2014), "Editorial", Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Vol. 27 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/AAAJ-04-2014-1681

Editorial

Article Type: Literature and insights From: Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Volume 27, Issue 5.

Can you take a joke?

It's been said, “A college professor is someone who talks in other people's sleep.” And that might prompt the old Vaudevillian response, “I resemble that remark!” but only, I hope, with a substantial dose of irony.

In my former profession, I practiced accounting in private, corporate, government, and not-for-profit roles in financial, taxation, management, and auditing fields (though not all at once, I should add). There were plenty of jokes about that work too. One gets used to it, and some of the humorous jibes are not always that far off the mark, I guess.

What does an accountant use as birth control? That's one of the common ones at the expense of accountants; no pun intended. I imagine nobody reading this is surprised. Accountants are not the only easy targets, though. All areas of work are fair game, of course, and some of the humor is fairly gentle stuff. Just search “accounting jokes” online and you will find cartoons, text jokes, stand-up videos, links to comic routines, and so on. There's no shortage of material. It's in motion pictures, TV, and advertising too.

In the movie The Producers, Gene Wilder plays the Leo Bloom, a gullible accountant with dreams who ends up happier and a little more enlightened. Until then, however, he is depicted as a dupe and a figure of fun, and the flavor of the narrative is that of redemption through embracing risk, of him being saved from his accounting self. The Monty Python crew's “Auditing” and “The League for Fighting Chartered Accountancy” TV sketches are also testament to that initial view.

The creative agency WCRS designed an advertisement in the UK for a diesel-engined Mini with the slogan “Unleash your inner accountant,” emphasizing its apparent low running costs while having a sly dig at the profession. YouTube has the animated series Harold Rosenbaum Chartered Accountant Extreme, a satirical crime noir cartoon blending dangerous excitement with office work.

Accounting jokes are also collected in books, as you would expect. There's Mark Geoffrey Young's 2011 title The Best Ever Book of Accountant Jokes: Lots and Lots of Jokes Specially Repurposed for Accountants. Is it different, though, from the same author's other 2011 release The Best Ever Book of Accountant Jokes: Lots and Lots of Jokes Specially Repurposed for You-Know-Who? They have different publishers.

There is also Rick Telberg’s publication The Accountant’s (Bad) Joke Book: Have you heard the one about […]?, available online. It’s some 20 pages long, so more like a chapbook. It has the rather stunning price of $265.50 from Amazon, yet if you source it through the CPA Trendlines Store, it is a mere $6.49 (apparently discounted from $7.99), and this time without an author being attributed. Perhaps there’s a hidden joke in that; maybe something about business skills. On the other hand, Susan Sherbert’s e-book Accounting and Bookkeeping Corny Jokes and Humor (2012) is CDN$1.99 for a pdf and it’s some 23 pages. Hang on! I think I’m slipping into audit mode.

Still, there's the argument that if you can’t beat them, you can join them, and some organizations do work on the basis of the “get in first” strategy. They share and tell jokes, even if not only about themselves and their profession, and they do it in various ways.

The Ascent Partnership of chartered accountants in Vancouver has a jokes page in its “Just for Fun” link. UK financial training business Financial Fluency invites accounting jokes to be featured on its web site, though there are only a couple of attributed ones there at present. US-based corporate training company Thorsten Consulting also reserves a page on its site for accounting jokes, though accountants don’t seem to be their only clients. It's unclear, then, whether these are cases of encouraging people to laugh at themselves or at others.

Brigham Young University's PhD preparation program for graduating MAcc students includes a section on accounting humor, with cartoons and text, though only one of the video links now work, and the humor discussion page is empty. There's an error message on the latter page mentioning that the “content before blanking was” and then it mentions a URL that includes a film actor's name and the word “nude.” Perhaps that one was beyond a joke.

Accountant 1, based in Georgia, USA, holds an annual “Search for the South's Funniest Accountant,” with contestants strutting their comedic talents to a live audience in pursuit of a prize trip to Las Vegas. Maybe that's the way to go: respond to the jokes with some of your own.

In all, there is clearly no shortage of laughs to be had at or with accountants – and Laughter is claimed to be the best medicine, isn’t it?

On a more serious note, both Henk J. ter Bogt, and Ashley Burrowes and Milorad Novicevic delve into the world of ethics when, respectively, they address issues of sustainability and accountability in their poems below.

Your own creative contributions can be submitted via ScholarOne (see below), and your e-mail correspondence is always welcome, of course, at: mailto:steve.evans@flinders.edu.au

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal (AAAJ) welcomes submissions of both research papers and creative writing. Creative writing in the form of poetry and short prose pieces is edited for the Literature and Insights Section only and does not undergo the refereeing procedures required for all research papers published in the main body of AAAJ.

Author guidelines for contributions to this section of the journal can be found at: www.emeraldinsight.com/products/journals/author_guidelines.htm?id=aaaj

Steve Evans
Literary Editor