Other laws are funny because they’re plainly reactive — drawn up, that is, in response to some travesty of behavior or perversion of the social contract. This includes the rule against feeding an unskinned wolverine to your dog in an Alaskan national park or the one that requires sprayable cheese to carry a warning label instructing users not to spray it in their eyes. The federal register is crammed with implications of low human comedy spelled out in exquisitely bloodless prose.

A third category of funniness is a question of scale. If you ever wondered why all bacon packages feature a transparent window of the bacon within, it’s because the law mandates that consumers must be able to see at least 70 percent of a “representative slice” through the packaging. If you stumble upon noncompliant bacon in the supermarket, you should definitely report it. The fact that something as piddling as a bacon sneak preview is a matter of federal concern is funny for the same reason it’s funny to see a monkey dressed in a suit.

I should offer a disclaimer here. I normally approach Twitter-spawned book deals the way I approach novelizations of movies, which is to say: not at all, thanks! It’s not snobbishness, it’s pattern-recognition. Jamming a bunch of Tweets together and calling it a book is like serving a thousand canapés and calling it a meal. The forms do not automatically, or even usually, translate. But when it comes to goofy legislation, the amplification beyond Tweet length actually benefits the comedy because context and extrapolation are the funniest parts.

What the truly fatuous laws underscore is how unthinkingly we rely on a mesh of norms to keep us out of trouble. A robust but unavoidably fluid understanding of relative priorities (known as prosecutorial discretion) means that drug lords and serial killers are fingered more readily than guys who sell defectively stapled matchbooks, but matchbook man still lives with the shadow of punishment over his head, even if he believes himself faultless: The law doesn’t usually require a person to know that an act is illegal for him to be charged and convicted of it.

There’s also an element of public service in play here. Somebody with credentials has combed through a mountain of boring literature, highlighted all the ticklish parts and served them up for appreciation. This is an excellent book for people who like to start sentences with “Did you know that …” or people who are titillated by the idea of a whole section called “Other Stamp Crimes.” It also provides a primer on how to read federal statutes, which is useful if you ever wondered what § meant. (It designates a particular section of a document, which is essential when it comes to organizing lengthy tomes of legal code. But now that you have a handle on §, it’s easy to think of recreational applications: aggressive emails, house rules for guests at your apartment and so on.)