This column is to appear in the Augusta Business Chronicle (July 2001). Funny It's July. It's summer. It's hot and humid. Time for some fun. Serious fun. I bet that few professions are made so much fun of as economics and economists. Often reflecting exasperation, desperation, ignorance, or unwillingness to face the issues, howlers are contributed by the poor souls who need to deal with economists. For  example, Herbert Hoover whined: "Please find me a one-armed economist so we will not always hear ‘On the other hand ...'" Well, well, well now, we know all about that: ever wonder why your insurance company says ‘On the other hand, let's get a second opinion'? Some witticisms are more discerning than Hoover's. Said John F. Kennedy, "if you have one foot on the hot plate, and the other in the freezer, on average, you are doing just fine." Averages make for great numbers: if Bill Gates earns all income in America, and you and I earn nothing, then, on average, we'd be doing just fine! For example, average family income is pretty high in the US compared to the rest of the world but it is also much more unevenly distributed. Some quips are kind-of-sick. You have probably heard this one, attributed to former US Senator Dirksen: "A billion here, a billion there, and soon you are talking about real money." Some wisecracks are stupid: Laurence J. Peter comments that "an economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today." Checked the weather forecast lately? And it wasn't an economist who predicted an Internet stock boom! Some jests are feeble-minded: business man Kirk Kerkorian declared that "if economists were any good at business, they would be rich men instead of advisers to rich men." And I say if business men were any good at thinking, they wouldn't need advisors. In fact, I do know of a couple billionaires who are academic PhD economists. Eat that, Mr. Kerkorian! David Ricardo and John Maynard Keynes – yes, he of "Keynesianism" – were very wealthy men, too. The examples can be multiplied. Some one-liners are plain funny. "Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do,"opines inimitable Oscar Wilde (take that, too, Mr. Kerkorian), and Josh Billings advises you to "live within your income, even if you have to borrow money to do so." An anonymous writer chimes in that "inflation means that your money won't buy as much today as it did when you didn't have any." Some are wise beyond their words: "There have been three great inventions since the beginning of time: fire, the wheel, and central banking" (Will Rogers). And some are childishly silly: "Saving is a very fine thing. Especially when your parents have done it for you" (Winston Churchill). Some turn on phrases: "GDP should really stand for grossly deceptive product," (The Economist magazine), which it is. And GNP stands for the name of a Washington, DC, cabaret group: the "gross national product." How fitting since there is surely much that is plain gross in our nation's capital. The best jokes are usually those contributed by economists themselves. Rare among the professions, we economists love to poke fun at ourselves. Here's one told by Lord Eatwell (John Eatwell is a well-known, and recently enobled, Cambridge economist.) A surgeon, a lawyer, and an economist muse about what is the world's oldest profession. "Surely," cries the surgeon, "it must be surgery, for the Bible tells us that God made Eve from Adam's rib!" For the sake of the lawyer, he commenced to quote Genesis 2:21: "And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof." "Ha," cuts in the lawyer, "but Genesis 1:3 begins to tell how God created order out of chaos, and order is what the law is about. Therefore," he smugly continues, "the law and the lawyer form the oldest profession in the world." "Yes, yes, yes," interjects the economist dismissively, "but in the first place: who made the chaos?" Dr. J. Brauer is Professor of Economics at Augusta State University's College of Business Administration. He can best be reached via his web site (http://www.aug.edu/~sbajmb).