When Cora Hoover Hooper, the hated mayor of a small town, is faced with a town bankruptcy, she concocts a fake "miracle" of water-from-a-rock to bring in tourism. Unfortunately, during the tourist rush, the inmates from the local asylum "for the socially pressured," the Cookie Jar, escape. A Doctor Hapgood surfaces who says he can identify the "cookies" and separate them from the "sane" members of society, but when the cookies' nurse, Fay Apple, refuses to identify her charges and then falls in love with Hapgood, trouble sets in.