A lawsuit against a stand-up comedian who made jokes about the Jewish family she married into was thrown out of court.
Sunda Croonquist, who is half African-American and half Swedish, has used her Jewish in-laws, especially her mother-in-law and sister-in-law, as a major source for her material for many years.
Croonquist’s mother-in-law, Ruth Zafrin of Brooklyn, N.Y., and brother-in-law and sister-in-law, Neil and Shelley Edelman of New Jersey, filed the case, claiming that Croonquist’s jokes were holding them up to public ridicule.
U.S. District Judge Mary Cooper of New Jersey dismissed the case in a 21-page ruling issued April 30. The judge said the jokes cited in the case were statements of opinion and not fact, and therefore they were protected by the First Amendment.
Croonquist had described her sister-in-law’s voice as sounding like “a cat in heat.” The Beverly Hills–based comic also said she learned that Jews can whisper when she met her mother-in-law “and I said, ‘It’s such a pleasure meeting you,’ and she said, ‘Have a seat; Eliot, put my pocketbook away.’ ”
The judge, quoting from a previous court decision, said the cat-in-heat joke was “colorful, figurative rhetoric that reasonable minds would not take to be factual.”
Croonquist’s husband, Mark Zafrin, is a partner in the law firm that represented her. — jta