Justice & Law Quote by Jef I. Richards

Richards lands the punch by borrowing the sanctimony of “calling” professions and then puncturing it with a nursery-room absurdity. Law and medicine get the cultural halo: they signal expertise, licensure, public service, and a tidy moral narrative. Advertising, in his setup, can’t even clear the first hurdle of dinner-table bragging rights. The image of new parents dreaming of a “media planner” is deliberately unromantic, almost bureaucratic. It’s not that the work is trivial; it’s that the title is allergic to heroism.

The intent is less to dunk on advertising than to expose how “profession” is a status word disguised as a neutral category. Richards, writing as a professor, is interrogating legitimacy: who gets to claim ethical seriousness, who gets trusted, who gets paid accordingly. The subtext is an anxiety that advertising, for all its sophistication, sits too close to persuasion-for-hire to enjoy the moral insulation granted to fields that can point to lives saved or rights defended.

The joke also smuggles in a critique of advertising’s internal identity problem. The industry often wants the authority of a profession while resisting the constraints that make professions feel trustworthy: standardized credentials, enforceable norms, a clear public-interest mandate. By staging the question in the language of parenthood and aspiration, Richards shows how cultural prestige is built: not by technical difficulty alone, but by a story society is willing to tell about why the work deserves reverence.