If you happen to be a French person, there is absolutely no down side to believing that Americans exist solely for your amusement.  It takes some of the sting out of having gone from world domination in the eighteenth century to being an irrelevant member of the G8 with naked pictures of your First Lady available on eBay in the twenty-first.

Therefore, while you (with some justification) insist on maintaining your superiority on at least one global front—matters related to getting snookered—feel free to do that nasally Pepé Le Pew laugh over our painfully American, stuck-in-Prohibition mentality, which has these embarrassing drinking laws on the books:

In Missouri, if your kid takes out the trash which contains an empty wine bottle, he/she can be charged with possession.  Have they no logic lobbyists in Jefferson City?  Meanwhile, while touring the ‘Show Me’ state, show me somebody in St. Louis drinking beer from a bucket and I’ll show you jailbait.

One out of five states refuses to allow liquor sales on election day, but has no trouble if we spend every other day drinking to get over who we just elected.

If you get a DUI in New Jersey, you’re prohibited from owning personalized license plate for three years.  Word to the wise: Once that period is up, don’t apply for SHTFCED.

Speaking of DUI, in Virginia you can be charged with a DUI as a drunk passenger.  Spot quiz: Yes or no, does that confuse the ‘designated driver’ concept?

In New Hampshire, you cannot be served an alcoholic drink unless you are sitting down, but nothing specifically prevents you from being served if you’re lying down.

In Maryland, your humble reporter would be unlikely to pass that state’s stringent requirements concerning wine writers. Not only are they restricted to three bottles per brand of product samples, but they must first be certified as experts by an agency of the state.

In Indiana, it is illegal for liquor stores to sell cold soft drinks, but room-temperature soft drinks are OK.  In Connecticut, you can’t sell beer after 8 PM.  Hardly anybody lets you sell booze on Christmas, which is an ACLU lawsuit-worthy slap-in-the-face to us alcoholic atheists.

In California, no alcoholic beverages may be displayed within 5 feet of a cash register if the store sells both alcohol and motor fuel.

In Fairbanks, Alaska, it’s illegal to serve liquor to a moose, and in Ohio, though not specifically forbidden to serve liquor to a fish, it is expressly against the law to get a fish drunk.

In Iowa it’s illegal to run a bar tab.

In Indiana, you can be incarcerated for carrying a drink from the bar (where you bought it) to your table (which is what you’ve been sitting at the bar waiting for).

Did someone say ‘bar’?  Bars in North Dakota are forbidden to serve beer and pretzels at the same time.  Nebraska bars may not sell beer except when simultaneously brewing a kettle of soup.

At least nobody mentioned ‘saloon’, especially in New York where it is verboten to call your saloon a saloon.  Which is why restaurateur Michael O’Neal’s saloon is named O’Neal’s Balloon.

In Kentucky, if you give someone a bottle of beer as a gift, you can go to jail for five years; roughly the same length of time it takes a newborn Kentuckian to reach legal marriageable age.

Texas state law, which prohibits taking more than three sips of beer while standing, makes it illegal to sell alcohol after midnight on Sunday, but allows the sale of alcohol at ‘any time’ on Monday—Texans, apparently, being confused as to when Monday officially begins.

Ah, Texas, land of superlatives, where executing prisoners is not only legal, but practically a state sport—a while back they killed three prisoners in one day.  (Not sure what that’s called in Houston, but I know what we call it in Detroit—a hat trick). Anyway, they’re responsible for the best liquor law of all:

The entire Encyclopedia Britannica is banned in Texas because it contains a recipe for making beer.

Laugh on, French people.  I’ll be in my padded wine cellar if you need me.