Dealing with lawyer "jokes"

Scheherazade's run into something I see a lot:

I notice at gatherings like the book group party and at a big family gathering of relatives people make lawyer jokes -- not the "two lawyers walk into a bar" kind but the "watch out, A.J., you don't want to say that around her, she's a lawyer" kind of comments and I don't really know what to make of them. Do people do this with other professions?

By way of reply I'll offer an anecdote from my days at Illinois. We were at dinner with a bunch of townies we knew through church. A couple of them were doctors who started in on me about lawyers. I took it for a while, but finally turned the tables by asking a couple of questions about the HMO for which they worked (a particularly large but infamously unpleasant one to deal with). This got the crowd going on HMOs, which is about as close as I've ever come to Churchillian repartee. I feel a little guilty about not turning the other cheeck, but only a little.