By Jimmy Magahern

It is illegal to hunt camels in Arizona. In Maricopa County, no more than six girls may live in a single house. Cars may not be driven in reverse in Glendale. In Mohave County, anyone caught stealing a bar of soap must wash themselves with it until it is all used up. And throughout the state, donkeys are not permitted to sleep in bathtubs. If you’ve spent considerable time on the Internet, chances are you’ve read a few of these so-called “dumb laws” — improbable and out-of-date bits of legislation that somehow remain on the books. Every state has its share: In Ohio, it is supposedly illegal to hunt for whales on a Sunday. In Massachusetts, it is said that a man must first obtain a license before wearing a goatee.

Many of these loony laws are the stuff of urban legend and inherited folk tales. As in the old childhood “telephone game,” where a sentence whispered into someone’s ear gets passed along repeatedly until the final version bears comically little in common with the original, some of these laws actually have roots in truth, but have become wildly exaggerated and altered over time — an effect multiplied now along the information superhighway. Once-legitimate ordinances transmogrify into stranger-than-fiction shtick for stand-up comics and a reliable source of absurdist humor for lazy bloggers. Indeed, at least one site on the Web (nonsense.sourceforge.net) offers randomly generated dumb laws that are often reposted as factual — to the amusement of the algorithm’s creators.

In which state the law exists hardly matters to the joke — unless the state itself has become notorious for its controversial laws. And in the wake of all the national attention being paid to SB 1070, and amusement over the recently signed SB 1307 (outlawing the creation of “human-animal hybrids”), the words “In Arizona” seem to add the perfect punch line to any riff about unfathomable laws.

Not surprisingly, many of the dumb laws attributed to Arizona today are “bogus,” according to Marshall Trimble, the Scottsdale Community College history professor appointed as “Arizona’s official historian” in 1997 by then-governor Fife Symington. Trimble, 71, keeps a list of several fictitious Arizona laws, many of which have been circulated for so long that people have come to assume they’re true. To whit:

In Arizona, committing a misdemeanor while wearing a red mask is a felony.

In Tucson, it’s illegal for women to wear pants.

In Globe, it’s illegal to play cards with a Native American.

In Nogales, it’s illegal to wear suspenders.

“All bogus,” Trimble says.

Some, however, contain at least a germ of truth. Snopes.com, the popular 15-year-old fact-checking site run by a California couple, David and Barbara Mikkelson, who’ve emerged as the Web’s leading debunkers of urban myths, unearthed a century-old ordinance in Tucson calling it a misdemeanor offense for a person to appear in public in a style of dress “not of his or her sex.” They found no specific prohibition of women wearing pants, however.

The preposterous-sounding law against hunting camels in Arizona turns out to have some basis in fact, too.

“Shooting camels might have been on the books 140 years ago, when camels were abandoned after the Great Camel Boundary Survey of 1857-1858 was finished,” says Trimble. Seems in the mid-1800’s, the U.S. Army, then still battling Native Americans over development of the southwestern frontier, experimented with the idea of using camels to do the work of horses and mules, since they could thrive on less water and could, in fact, carry more than twice the load of a standard packhorse. After importing hundreds from Egypt to Texas, the camel cavalry experiment was abandoned at the start of the Civil War, and eventually the animals either wandered off from vacated forts or were sold to private businesses. At one point, a camel express mail service was tried around Tucson, and later a herd of 25 were employed hauling ore from the Silver King mine to Yuma. Eventually they were turned loose in the desert.

Although there have been no wild camel sightings in Arizona since workers on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe railroad reported spotting one near Wickenburg in 1913, they are apparently still protected from hunters.

“They were shot for sport for a time,” explains Trimble, “but I can’t understand why politicians would have a problem with letting your donkey sleep in your bathtub.”

Dumb-Law Anatomy

So how does a law go from a justifiable piece of legislation addressing a legitimate concern of the times to fodder for joke writers on The Colbert Report?

To examine the anatomy of a dumb law, one need look no further than Arizona’s recently passed SB 1307, which began as a serious attempt to block usage of human embryos for scientific stem-cell research and wound up reading like a farcical plot from a science-fiction movie.

The key comedic ingredient was the inclusion of a passage barring any person from “intentionally or knowingly creating or attempting to create a human-animal hybrid.” Internet bloggers quickly latched on to the imagery, likening it to the mythical “ManBearPig” from the cartoon South Park. Within days, the bill was already sounding as ludicrous as the century-old proclamation in Tombstone barring anyone over the age of 18 from smiling with more than one visible missing tooth.

Democratic Arizona State Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, who vehemently opposed the bill based on its main objective of impeding stem-cell research, says the added text only served to worsen Arizona’s image as the country’s dumb-law capital.

“Including a ban on human-animal hybrids in the bill simply added to the growing list of laws being passed here that make Arizona the laughing stock of the nation,” she says. “I mean, seriously, we are dealing with some of the most difficult times our state has ever faced, and our lawmakers are concerned about the threat of a human-animal hybrid? For reals?”

Sinema, now in her third term in the House, says crazy text is often added to bills to ensure prompt passage: Whether or not representatives are opposed to embryonic stem-cell research, certainly nobody wants a mutant half man/half cow roaming the city streets.

But in the case of SB 1307, introduced by Republican House Rep. Nancy Barto, Sinema says its proponents actually fought hard for the inclusion of that particular provision in the bill, citing experiments by a British research team working on creating stem cells by replacing the nucleus in a fertilized cow egg with human DNA.

“Here’s the thing: they actually don’t believe it’s crazy,” she says. “Nancy Barto stood up on the floor of the House and said this is a real problem. She said there are scientists in other countries that want to make animal hybrids, and we need to stop this. She really believes that there’s a threat of human-animal hybrids coming to Arizona.”

Many nonsensical laws result when lawmakers are influenced by extreme religious groups or lobbyists with outdated views on culture, race or sex, Sinema says. On SB 1307, she says Barto received the original text from an organization called the Center for Arizona Policy — “part of the vast evangelical Christian right-wing network that seeks basically to stop any kind of scientific research that involves the manipulation of human cells. They also urged passage of a bill back in 2006 that would prohibit human cloning — another big problem in Arizona, right?”

The Dog that Doesn’t Bark

It’s likely that morality watchdogs were also at the helm of the old law supposedly enacted in Maricopa County barring more than six females from living in a single house. Or at least behind the insistence that such a law ever existed.

“I reckon a law against more than six girls occupying a house was to thwart houses of prostitution,” says Trimble, who’s read that the law was enacted during the Wild West days to constrain its honky-tonk women. “But what about sorority houses on college campuses? Don’t those sweet gals know they might be accused of impersonating prostitutes?”

Snope’s Barbara Mikkelson says they’ve heard variations on the so-called “brothel law” told in states all around the country, with the number of unrelated female roomies triggering the sheriff ranging from five to eight. “This legend is told as true on any number of U.S. campuses,” Mikkelson writes, “always by way of explanation for each school’s lack of sorority houses.”

Mikkelson reports the “stubbornly promulgated” dumb law was actually born from the merger of a couple of popularly held beliefs, “half-remembered tidbits about old-time ‘blue laws’ mixed with a healthy dollop of badly parsed newer input about zoning laws.” Nevertheless, the law has taken on a rich life of its own. Chicago Sun-Times film critic Richard Roeper, in a 1994 column, called it “the most widespread piece of university folklore making the rounds,” noting its appearance on college bulletin boards since at least the 1960s and told on at least 100 campuses.

“If any so-called ‘brothel laws’ anywhere tie a building’s classification as a bordello to the number of occupants, we’ve yet to find documentation that proves this,” concludes Mikkelson. In its fact-checking, Snopes found a 1998 report by a group of eight students at Tulane University who actually searched the New Orleans and Louisiana state laws trying to find the statute, to no avail. A student researcher said they checked law books dating as far back as the 1800s.

Tracing a wacky law down to its actual state or local code can be difficult, especially when, as with the brothel law, it appears out of a convergence of two or more popular myths.

But what about the few that can actually be documented? Some originate as minor court decisions in small neighborhood disputes that later become precedents in other cases, their language gradually simplified and separated from their original context. A reporter for the Kingman Daily Miner tracked down the “no donkeys in bathtubs” law to a 1924 case where a local merchant’s donkey, who’d taken to sleeping in an old bathtub, had accidentally taken a ride on flood waters after a burst in the nearby dam. Barring the animal from sleeping in the tub again was no doubt swift justice for the townspeople who reportedly griped of having to retrieve the surfin’ burro.

But why would such a law remain on the books, long after the particular ass in question has passed on to that big prairie in the sky?

“People don’t go looking for it. It’s the dog that doesn’t bark,” says Marc Miller, a professor at the University of Arizona’s Rogers College of Law. “A better question is: Why does anyone care if it remains on the books? It takes up very little space on the shelves. And even if someone did care, moving a legislature, getting it to take a law off the books, is a lot of work. You need a bill, and the governor has to sign it and then it can be amended or modified. It’s a process.”

Occasionally a modern legislature will become compelled to take a new look at an old law, most commonly if one is found to be racially discriminatory. But those are the rare exceptions, Miller says.

“Any number of these old, odd and often unenforceable provisions might strike people as strange,” he notes. “But is any individual actually affected by one of them? Is any business prevented from going about their operation while the law is in the books? If you find one of those, then you’ve got an interesting puzzle. Other than that, you’ve just got an amusing story.”

To curb the amount of dumb laws remaining on the books, Miller recommends building an automatic “sunset provision” into all but the most timeless laws.

“Obviously for things like homicide, the laws shouldn’t go away. But for others, they could include an explicit statement along the lines of, ‘This law will lose effect without reauthorization on this date.’ Laws should always be refreshed. The rulings of a prior generation should not be in control of a current generation.”

Sinema suggests that the dumb law count could also be diminished if legislatures only stopped creating fresh ones — particularly in Arizona. A hundred years from now, what will people make of the curio, “In Arizona, it’s illegal to create a half man/half cow”?

“Of course, that bill passed on the same day that the House passed the Obama birthday bill,” says Sinema, referring to a measure, still up for approval by the Senate, that would require anyone running for the nation’s top office to show their birth certificates in order to be on the state’s ballot. “That one says all U.S. presidential candidates will have to come to Arizona to provide their birth certificate, and our secretary of state — on his own — will decide whether or not it’s authentic.

“We got this and SB 1307 on the same day,” Sinema says with a weary sigh. “It’s embarrassing!”