Mormons can be funny, just ask them

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Thirty-one years ago this Christmas, a little book of Mormon cartoons by Calvin Grondahl, Freeway to Perfection , hit the LDS market like an underwater earthquake, suddenly erupting on the surface.

Brigham Young University students lined up by the hundreds to get a signed copy. Deseret Book couldn't keep it in stock. The green-covered wonder was passed around surreptitiously at church and openly at Mormon family parties. White-haired Relief Society presidents bought dozens for their children and grandchildren.

"It was as groundbreaking as Columbus finding the new world," recalls longtime Salt Lake Tribune political cartoonist Pat Bagley, who has published about a dozen Mormon cartoon books. "It opened up a new world of Mormon humor."

Tribune humor columnist Robert Kirby says Grondahl, then an editorial cartoonist at the Deseret News , set the standard by which every LDS humorist would be measured.

Kirby remembers flipping through Freeway during a Mormon sacrament meeting when he landed on Grondahl's cartoon of a father holding up a monster baby for congregational approval.

He couldn't stop laughing and had to leave the chapel -- a moment he marks as the beginning of his career in Mormon humor.

"That's when I started thinking, regardless whether you believe this [Mormon doctrine] to be true," Kirby says, "human behavior about it is still funny."

Grondahl did not expect his Mormon cartoon book, soon followed by a second and third volume, to have such an impact.

"Back then, I believe that the [LDS] Church leaders wanted it all to go away, but it didn't," says Grondahl, a cartoonist at Ogden's Standard-Examiner . "And now, with the Internet, an LDS laugh or a shock is only a click away."

Indeed, Mormon humor now ripples across the culture -- in movies, magazines, plays, books, blogs and Web sites. Its tone ranges from innocent fun to biting satire and raunchy sarcasm.

Adult Mormon humor has a "fair amount of passive-aggressivity to it," says Christopher Bigelow, creator of The Sugar Beet, a satirical Mormon Web site modeled after The Onion. The Beet offers spoof stories and headlines such as "Missionary Accidentally Calls Prophet 'Dude.' "

LDS culture and belief system can be rigid and "resistant to any kind of disruption of the smooth, conformist functioning of the hive," Bigelow says. "But sometimes a worker bee has just got to assert his individuality and signal that some aspects of Mormon culture seem fairly absurd to him, and humor can be a veiled, indirect way of doing that."

Few other religions, he says, "create as much of a cultural pressure cooker as Mormonism does."

Small kids, big laughs

The most consistently popular style is the kids-say-the-darndest-things genre, but even that has opened up in new and riskier ways since the 1970s.

Anecdotes from Mormon Mishaps and Mischief: Hilarious Stories for Saints , a new book by Nichole Giles of Pleasant Grove and Cindy Beck of Santaquin, includes 200 of what the authors say are true anecdotes from various submitters.

They tend to highlight embarrassing moments such as toilet paper trailing from a skirt or naked children strolling up the chapel aisle. They play on mistaken words such as the "oddmonition of Paul" (instead of admonition) and doing battle with "Laman Knights" (instead of The Book of Mormon's Lamanites).

But they also offer some unintended double-entendres such as the following:

"Holding a Kleenex to damp eyes and struggling with her feelings, [a woman in an LDS testimony meeting] said, 'I don't do this very often because I'm such a big boob.'

"After she sat down, a member of the bishopric stepped to the pulpit.

"Offering what he thought was consolation, he said, 'That's OK; we like big boobs.' "Or this one:

A recently returned missionary, commenting on an LDS scripture, said to an all-male priesthood meeting, "At one time or another, everyone experiences some type of bondage."

Giles and Beck see such slips as part of the fun.

"There are a few that are a little more edgy, but it's the balance that counts," Giles says. "What makes me laugh the hardest may not make someone else laugh. It's all in your perspective."

The two authors, who met at an LDStorymakers Conference about four years ago, see laughter as healing and important in the Mormon community.

"Church is a sacred, reverent time, but that doesn't mean we can't see the humor in things that happen there," says Beck, who writes a humor column for the Sanpete Messenger . "I think God has a good sense of humor, so I don't think he would mind at all."

Walking the line

How do Mormons who write or draw humor about LDS culture decide when a punch line goes too far?

At the Sugar Beet, Bigelow says, writers "reined in" the satire enough to keep it from being too irreverent, but many members felt they didn't hold back enough.

"Whew, good thing they didn't see the raw stuff we didn't publish," says Bigelow, who edited a book of satirical items from The Beet, called The Mormon Tabernacle Enquirer . It met with moderate success.

He is frustrated with the lack of enthusiasm for edgy LDS humor.

"Humor is an important outlet for me," Bigelow says. "It helps certain kinds of personalities stay more connected with the culture if we can gently mock it a little. I'd love to see the culture loosen up a little and not be so safe and conformist."

Bagley knows the LDS Church, he says, and knows how far to push it. But he did break a barrier with his caricature of then-President Gordon B. Hinckley being interviewed by Larry King in 1998. It was the first time Bagley ever had depicted a living church president. Though some readers complained that the cartoon was disrespectful, Bagley felt Hinckley was drawn with affection.

That's where Kirby draws the line, too -- it depends on whether you love what you're making fun of.

"It's like your family members, who can be extremely annoying so much you want to beat them, but you also love them because they are part of you," he says. "I love my church."

Kirby stays away from lampooning LDS temple ceremonies and general authority speeches, but most everything else is a fair target. He especially is amused by people who can't tell the difference between making fun of God and making fun of yourself.

"Through humor, we recognize, are comfortable with and can recover from our own fallible natures," he says. "If we couldn't laugh at ourselves, we'd go nuts."

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