Don't Stick Ice Cream In Your Back Pocket
Category: Strange Laws 27th May 2026
Here we go: one of those laws that sounds like the punchline of a bad joke but stubbornly refuses to die. In Alabama there is an old statute that forbids carrying an ice cream cone in your back pocket. I did not make that up; you can find the line quoted in more than one compendium of American oddities. It reads like something dreamed up by a magistrate who loved both horseradish and horseless carriages.
The usual origin story is the good kind of folklore: back when horses were the family Uber, thieves allegedly put an ice cream cone in their back pocket so they could steal a horse without being able to mount it properly. The cone was a bribe to curious dogs or a distraction for bored stable hands, or perhaps just a convenient way to keep a free hand while holding the reins. Whatever the truth, somebody thought it clever to outlaw the behaviour, and the rule stubbornly stuck around in legal anthologies and on novelty websites.
Before you pack a cone and stage a Wet Hot American Back-Pocket Summer, relax: the law is rarely, if ever, enforced. It is the sort of statute that survives because nobody has bothered to tidy up a century of municipal whimsy. Still, that is the delicious part. There is comfort in knowing that somewhere a clerk once had the leisure to legislate manners for desserts and horses, and the paperwork was completed with the same grim satisfaction as a church raffle prize list.
I have a soft spot for laws like this. They are the bureaucratic postcards from an earlier century, equal parts practical and petty. They give cocktail party bragging rights and make great material for a retired gossip columnist who spent years filing away the absurd so the rest of you could feel normal. So if you are ever in Alabama, and you find your cone needs a resting place, do the decent thing: eat it, share it, or tuck it in a napkin. Leave the back pocket to your wallet and the small tragedies of daily life.