Basic Trope: Weird laws.
- Straight: Tropeville has laws against allowing monkeys to sleep in bathtubs and wearing yellow on Wednesdays.
- Exaggerated: All of Tropeville's laws are downright weird, including "no reading signs". They're very heavily enforced, too.
- Downplayed:
- Tropeville has a law against driving a tractor while drunk. While it's weird that the law is this specific, it is a legitimate danger and most places already have laws about operating any vehicle while intoxicated.
- Tropeville has some specific laws, but no one really pays attention to them.
- Justified:
- Incidents such as monkeys in bathtubs and people wearing yellow on Wednesdays really did lead to some sort of disaster, which may or may not be specified.
- The town's mayor is a Cloud Cuckoolander.
- The laws made sense when the town was first founded, but not so much anymore.
- Inverted: ???
- Subverted: The law against allowing monkeys to sleep in bathtubs was misinterpreted. It's actually a law against keeping monkeys as pets, which is a fairly sensible law.
- Double Subverted: But it's still illegal to wear yellow on Wednesdays. This is never specified.
- Parodied: ???
- Zig-Zagged: (Continuing from Double Subverted) It's later mentioned that wearing yellow on Wednesdays was historically a tradition only done by the town's officials, not the common people. However, this tradition has since fallen out of practice, but the immortal Hanging Judge of the town has a preference for attaching it to the list of crimes in any judgement he is personally overseeing in order to increase (or ensure) punishments.
- Averted: All of the laws in Tropeville make complete sense.
- Enforced: There are several odd laws in Real Life, so the creators of the series wanted to acknowledge that.
- Lampshaded: ???
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: The town's lawmakers realize that these laws are unnecessary and repeal them.
- Discussed:
- "Why can't we wear yellow on Wednesdays and allow monkeys to sleep in bathtubs? What if only my socks or underwear was yellow? Where would I even get a monkey anyway? What if a monkey chooses to sleep in a bathtub, would I have to make him leave?"
- "What the hell happened to make them pass that law in the first place?"
- Conversed: "You know what's funny? In Denver, Colorado, you can't drive a black car on Sunday."
- Played for Laughs: The weird laws are played for Surreal Humor.
- Played for Drama:
- Tropeville is a dystopia where all of the laws are strange, and people who disobey them have a tendency to be Released to Elsewhere or forced to understand why they're important.
- The loony law is too obviously loony (and outdated) to enforce, but the cops unleash it anyway to arrest someone. It depends on the writer on whether it's dirty cops looking for a reason/using a weapon to cause a Miscarriage of Justice or heroic cops trying to bring Justice by Other Legal Means.
- Played for Horror: Bob wears yellow on a Wednesday in Tropeville, and just for that suffers a horrifying public execution.
Back to Loony Laws, but please remember that you have to wear a silly hat first.
