Artificial intelligence is pushing deeper into accounting, taking on work once reserved for junior staff, technical specialists and corporate reporting teams.
But at least one part of the profession is proving harder to automate: the jokes.
Former Financial Accounting Standards Board member Marc Siegel tested that limit on May 7, 2026, telling accountants in Manhattan that he had asked AI to help him prepare jokes as he took over as chair of Baruch College’s annual financial reporting conference.
The result, he suggested, should reassure anyone worried that machines are about to replace the profession’s human touch.
“I curated,” Siegel said after reading two AI-generated accounting jokes to the room. “These are the two best ones. So keep that in mind. Everybody who’s worried about jobs with AI—no, don’t worry about it.”
The line drew laughs because it hit a nerve beyond comedy.
A Profession Under Pressure
Accounting is in the middle of an AI moment, with firms, companies, regulators and universities weighing how the technology will change financial reporting, auditing, controls and disclosure work.
AI can process rules, draft memos and mimic technical language. It can sound, at least on the surface, like it belongs in the profession.
But Siegel’s experiment exposed a narrower and more revealing problem: AI can reproduce accounting jargon, but it struggles with accounting culture.
That culture is funnier than outsiders often assume.
Accountants have long been caricatured as dry number-crunchers in a gray profession. Inside the field, humor is a release valve in a business built on deadline pressure, regulatory scrutiny, dense standards and high-stakes judgment calls.
Siegel’s AI jokes showed the gap.
One said “this conference will follow GAAP—generally accepted amount of PowerPoint.” Another said writing an accounting standard takes about three years, plus “another 10 years for the profession to debate what it actually meant.”
The jokes had the right vocabulary. They did not have the timing, history or lived-in feel of someone who knows why a room of accountants would laugh.
Norman Strauss did.
Strauss, the longtime chair of the Baruch conference, was known for making even accounting crowds laugh—not because the material was flashy, but because he knew how to land it.
One of his go-to jokes made the point perfectly: A new prisoner arrives at a jail where inmates have heard the same jokes so many times they no longer tell them—they just call out numbers.
“Forty-two!” one prisoner shouts. The room roars.
“Seventeen!” another calls. More laughter.
The new guy decides to try.
“Twenty-three!” he yells.
Silence.
Confused, he asks what went wrong.
An old prisoner shrugs: “Some people just don’t know how to tell a joke.”
The Human Factor
Siegel, acknowledging the standard Strauss had set, said: “Clearly, AI is not taking over for Norm—it can’t compete with Norm. So we have a long way to go with AI.”
It was a light moment, but it landed in the middle of a much more serious conversation. Across the profession, AI was also being discussed in connection with Securities and Exchange Commission priorities, FASB standard-setting, audit committees and investor input.
That contrast sharpened the point. The technology may become a powerful tool in accounting, but the profession still depends on qualities that are difficult to code: skepticism, judgment, communication and trust.
Humor belongs on that list.
Siegel’s own joke landed more naturally than the AI material.
He told the audience his children would never believe so many people had “voluntarily” shown up for an accounting discussion.
He then recalled his 10-year-old son setting up his first iPhone in 2009. When prompted to enter an emergency contact, the boy immediately typed his mother’s name.
Siegel asked why he had not been considered.
“Dad, mom’s a pediatrician,” Siegel quoted his son as saying. “You’re an accountant.”
Then came the kicker: “What possible emergency could I have that I need to call you? What, I accidentally divide by zero?”
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