|
?:reviewBody
|
-
The story has been published in any number of joke and anecdote books. Variously, this tale concludes with the judge threatening to send the lawyers to the electric chair or have them jailed for contempt if they dare ask the witness if she knows him. The legendary outspoken grandmotherly sort of woman has in different versions been said to be from Mississippi, Texas, or South Carolina. One version from 2003 asserts It happened in Pontiac, (a suburb of Charleston) South Carolina, in 2001. That claim we can certainly put to rest, in that the story of the old lady on the stand who delivers scathingly accurate character assessments of the lawyers present appeared in a self-published collection of jokes and anecdotes by British author Charlie Walker in 2000. As to whether there's as much as a kernel of truth to the tale, it needs be kept in mind that any jurist worthy of sitting on the bench would swiftly intervene if a witness on the stand began subverting such podium into her own personal soapbox. Likely before the woman had finished saying Why yes I do know you since you were a little boy, and frankly you've been a big disappointment to me, the judge would have halted her either by admonishing her to restrict her answers to a simple yes or no or by telling the attorney who had placed her on the stand to control his witness. The humor of the piece plays upon the notion that almost everyone has secrets about themselves they'd rather not see come to light. While we might not individually identify with shyster small town lawyers who cheat on their spouses and parade about as far better people then they actually are, the underlying truth that just about everyone's past harbors something that person is at least a little bit ashamed of cannot be denied.
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}