Dumb Laws in Popular Culture
In "The Seven-Beer Snitch", an episode of The Simpsons, the police seek to send more people to jail on obscure laws because Mr. Burns is annoyed that a lack of inmates are costing him and the city a lot of revenues. They arrest Homer Simpson for violation of a dumb law on the books which states that in Springfield tin cans may not be kicked more than five times, as it would constitute "illegally transporting litter." Ironically, Homer was kicking the can out of frustration for being denied employment as a guard at the very same prison he was sent to for violating the law. Chief Wiggum also mentions a law that all men must be hatless during daylight hours, but when Smithers cannot remove his hat in time, Wiggum chuckles and says "If I didn't arrest you that night in the park, I'm not going to arrest you now."
The comic character Jughead Jones has had an occasional appearance as Professor Jughead, when he presents various weird laws.
On the TV series Parks and Recreation, the show regularly mentions the many archaic, forgotten, idiotic or downright bigoted laws that the town of Pawnee has passed during its long, pathetic history. In one case, Donna Retta is furious to learn that African Americans are banned from walking on town sidewalks; in another, Leslie Knope is disgusted when the town's election monitor reminds everyone that a tie vote in a City Council election between one male and one female candidate will result in the man being awarded the seat and the woman being put in jail.
Read more about this topic: Dumb Laws
Famous quotes containing the words dumb, laws, popular and/or culture:
“The ant, who has toiled and dragged a crumb to his nest, will furiously defend the fruit of his labor, against whatever robber assails him. So plain, that the most dumb and stupid slave that ever toiled for a master, does constantly know that he is wronged.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“While I am in favor of the Government promptly enforcing the laws for the present, defending the forts and collecting the revenue, I am not in favor of a war policy with a view to the conquest of any of the slave States; except such as are needed to give us a good boundary. If Maryland attempts to go off, suppress her in order to save the Potomac and the District of Columbia. Cut a piece off of western Virginia and keep Missouri and all the Territories.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)