Those lists of absurd laws still supposedly on the books — are any of them real?

Having chased a number of these to the source, they sort into four buckets and only the last is interesting.

Pure invention. No statute, no ordinance, no record of either. The claim traces back to a listicle citing another listicle citing a third, and the chain terminates without ever reaching a legal text. This is the largest category by a wide margin.

Repealed long ago. A real law once existed and was removed decades or centuries back. The list reports it in the present tense because "was repealed in 1912" makes a worse item.

Real but wildly misdescribed. A general ordinance about obstruction or public nuisance gets retold as a specific ban on one absurd act. The underlying rule is mundane; the retelling is not.

Real, obsolete and unrepealed. These do exist. Legal codes are large and nobody profits from tidying them, so genuinely archaic provisions can survive. They are also, almost always, unenforceable — superseded by later law, or by constitutional provisions that override them.

That last point is the one the lists never mention, and it is the whole story: a provision sitting in an old code is not the same as a rule anyone could be prosecuted under.

The method for checking one of these is short and it works on almost every claim of this shape.

1. Demand a citation to a legal text, not to an article. A real law has a code section number. If nobody in the chain can produce one, you are done.
2. Search the jurisdiction's own published code. Most are online and searchable, and this is faster than people expect.
3. Check whether it was repealed or superseded. Published codes usually annotate this.
4. Check the date of the earliest version of the claim. Very often the trail leads to a single humour piece from decades ago that was later quoted straight.

Step 4 is the satisfying one. A remarkable number of these claims have a single identifiable origin in something that was never meant to be taken as fact, and every subsequent repetition is a copy of a copy.

One tell you can use without any research at all: the item has no jurisdiction, no date and no section number.

Real legal facts come with those attached, because that is how anyone would find them again. Claims in this genre are almost always vague about at least two of the three, and vagueness in a claim that would be easy to make specific is usually a sign that nobody has ever made it specific.

Worth naming why the genre is so durable, because that explains why debunking one never kills it.

These items are cheap to repeat and expensive to check. Writing one costs nothing; verifying one means reading a legal code. That asymmetry means the claims propagate faster than corrections, regardless of truth.

They also flatter the reader — the pleasure is in feeling that officialdom is absurd — and content that flatters travels further than content that complicates. Which is why the same items reappear every year with a new headline, long after each has been individually checked and dismissed.