Metro

Joke’s on kin who sued comic

A standup comedian sued over mother-in-law jokes got the last laugh when a federal judge threw out the case.

Sunda Croonquist, whose shtick for years has been to describe her life as a half-black, half-Swedish woman who marries into a Jewish family, got slapped with a suit two years ago by her mother-in-law, sister-in-law and brother-in-law, claiming they were held up to public ridicule.

In a ruling issued Friday, New Jersey federal Judge Mary L. Cooper concluded that the examples they cited — including one in which Croonquist says her sister-in-law’s voice sounds like a cat in heat — fell under the category of protected speech.

Many of the jokes, Cooper said, were clearly statements of opinion and not fact and therefore protected by the First Amendment.

The cat-in-heat joke, the judge said, quoting from a previous court decision, was “colorful, figurative rhetoric that reasonable minds would not take to be factual.”

The suit was filed in New Jersey because Croonquist’s brother-in-law and sister-in-law, Neil and Shelley Edelman, live there. Croonquist lives in Beverly Hills and her mother-in-law, Ruth Zafrin, lives in Brooklyn.