A lawyer, accountant, engineer, and priest escaped a sinking ship together on a life raft, not far from shore. The raft was surrounded by sharks. Foolishly, the accountant jumped in the water to swim to shore and was devoured. Before anyone could say anything, the lawyer jumped in, the sharks parted, and the lawyer swam through.
"How did he do that?" the engineer asked.
"Professional courtesy," the priest responded.

That is how you heard it; I grant that. But the origin of the joke is accountancy. The only jokes I know with physicists and mathematicians also include an engineer and they cannot be told in front of children. (Brenner knows them all by heart.)

Programmer joke: "Let's push the car back before it crashed, roll up the windows and try it again."

Agree with StaightLine.
No lawyers? No.
Less Lawyers? Yes, which consequently will come with more personal accountability and responsibility.

What is the difference between Lawyers and road kill?

There are skid marks before the roadkill.

After closer inspection, I see that I stole SkiDance's joke.

Let me try again.

What do you call a lawyer with an IQ of 100? You Honor.
What do you call a lawyer with an IQ of 50? Senator....perhaps Senator Blutowski.

Definition of tragedy: a busload of lawyers going over the cliff with two empty seats.

If a lawyer and a snake are both run over on the freeway, how do you tell which was which?

The snake has skid marks in front of it.

LOL

Personally I don't think they're apocryphal at all, but then again you did say "may". I guess it depends on your definition of "may". (he he)

actually mine originally had a mathematician where he asked the physicist the question

Do I know a group more arrogant than lawyers? Sure. I grew up with doctors. What is the difference between a surgeon and God? God does not think that he is a surgeon. On and on... If you ever had surgery, you would have signed a form agreeing that medicine is an art not a science and that outcomes cannot be predicted. In Goethe's _Faust_, the doctor says that when the plague struck, he mixed up any potion he could think of; and he killed half his patients; and the ones who survived called him their Savior. Do we have too many doctors? Is our nation being ruined by arrogant medicine men?

Every profession has jokes: engineering, computer programming... I even know some carpenter jokes. Khalling's quip actually came from accountancy, where it makes more sense.

The lawyer jokes were just crude Internet chaff; and lawyers are too easy a target for all the wrong reasons.

Get a sense of humor. I said they might be apocryphal. As a non-practicing lawyer myself, I think I am qualified to state that the only group that is more pompous and holds itself in higher regard than lawyers are politicians, which, not surprisingly, is composed mostly of lawyers. Anything that knocks either group from their self-erected pedestals is to be encouraged. I would like to live in a nation with a lot fewer lawyers. They are responsible for creating much of the blob that is our government, and writing the mountains of laws and regulations that are tying our nation down with so many Lilliputian strings.

These are not corroborated in any way. The writing style betrays the fact that one person wrote them, albeit from another similar source. It is easy to make fun of lawyers, or doctors, or anyone, really, but what purpose does it serve? Would you want to live in a nation without lawyers?

What's the difference between vultures and lawyers?

Vultures don't get frequent flyer points.

You say that the stairs went down to the basement?
Yes.
And these stairs, did they go up also?

A university committee was selecting a new dean. They had narrowed the candidates down to a mathematician, an economist and a lawyer.

Each was asked this question during their interview: "How much is two plus two?"

The mathematician answered immediately, "Four."

The economist thought for several minutes and finally answered, "Four, plus or minus one."

Finally the lawyer stood up, peered around the room and motioned silently for the committee members to gather close to him. In a hushed, conspiratorial tone, he replied, "How much do you want it to be?"