Mormon Humor: Part 1
May 29th, 2007 by Glenn
This site has been up and running for about a month now and there is a lot of joking that goes on here. I enjoy it and I can see that several others of you do as well. But I also worry about it sometimes. It raises questions and often perplexes me. Religion is a such a serious thing, right? Eternal salvation (or damnation), the restoration of the fullness of the gospel, the three-fold mission of the church, our personal convictions and testimony of truth, belief in modern-day prophets and divine revelation – these are all very serious themes. And yet there is so much humor built around them. Why? What does the humor do?
There are far too many examples to give in a single blog post, so I am labeling this “Part 1” with the intention of returning to this topic from time to time. But for starters, but let me give a few examples. Do you think these are funny? Why or why not?
- A woman visiting Salt Lake City in the latter half of the 18th century sees someone that she thinks may be Brigham Young, the leader of the Mormon church.
Woman: “Are you Brigham Young?”
Brigham Young: “I am.”
Woman: “Are you the Brigham Young that is the head of the Mormon church?”
Brigham Young: “I am.”
Woman: “Are you the Brigham Young that led the Mormons to Utah?”
Brigham Young: “I am.”
Woman: “Are you the Brigham Young that denounces all Christian religions as false except Mormonism?”
Brigham Young: “I am.”
About this time, the woman is beginning to lose her temper.
Woman: “Are you the Brigham Young who preaches polygamy?”
Brigham Young: “I am.”
Now she’s really getting mad.
Woman: “Are you the Brigham Young who has 26 wives?”
Brigham Young: “I am.”
Then furiously, she says -
Woman: “You ought to be Hung!”
Brigham Young: “I am.”
* * * * *
J. Golden Kimball was on a train from San Francisco to Chicago. He happened to overhear the following conversation from a few men sitting behind him:
Man #1: You know, those Mormons are spreading all over the place. It seems like you can’t go anywhere today without bumping in to one of them. Why just the other day I was in San Jose and there’s a whole group of Mormons there.
Man #2: I know what you mean. I was out in Phoenix, and there are a bunch of Mormons there, too.
Man #3: I was in New York City, and there were Mormons there.
The conversation went on like this for several minutes until J. Golden Kimball finally got fed up and turned to men and said, “Oh, why don’t you all just go to hell. You won’t find any Mormons there!”
* * * * *
A Catholic bishop from Washington dies and meets St Peter at the pearly gates. Peter takes him on a tour of heaven. They walk down a long hall of doors full of beautiful music and singing behind them. Finally Peter leads the bishop up a set of stairs and tells him to be very quite. When the Bishop asks why, Peter says “Because this is where we keep the Mormons, and they think they’re the only ones here.”
* * * * *
Two missionaries came across a catholic priest.
Priest: “Hello sons of Satan.”
Missionaries: “Hello Father.”
* * * * *
There was once a Catholic Bishop who was very proud of his parish and he was walking down a street and he came acrosss a young boy wholding some new born puppies. he asked the boy what was the religion of the puppies. the reply was Catholic Father. This made the Bishop very happy. the next day he again walked down this street and saw the boy, he again asked the religion of the Pups and got the same reply. A short time later the Bishop was entertaining his Cardinal and thought I would show him how devoted my parish is, so he took the cardinal down the street to where the boy was playing and asked what religion are your puppies young man. The reply came” They are are Mormon, Father.” The Bishop was shocked and said” but the other day you said they were catholic. The boy smiled and said “the other day they were blind and could not see but now their eyes are opened.”
* * * * *
D&C 88: 69, 121
69 Remember the great and last promise which I have made unto you; cast away your idle thoughts and your excess of laughter far from you.
121 Therefore, cease from all your light speeches, from all laughter, from all your lustful desires, from all your pride and light-mindedness, and from all your wicked doings.
D&C 59: 15
15 And inasmuch as ye do these things with thanksgiving, with cheerful chearts and countenances, not with much laughter, for this is sin, but with a glad heart and a cheerful countenance—
Is it wrong to joke about religious things? What is appropriate in Mormon humor? What is inappropriate? Where do you draw the line? What place does humor play in your life as a Mormon?
I’ll bet you have “A Time to Laugh.”
Making fun with prophet’s personality quirks is one thing. Making fun of their holy calling is another entirely. Making fun with cultural things — like green jello — is okay. Making fun of sacred things — like garments — is not. That’s about how I draw my line and I don’t like mean-spirited jokes. The baptized puppy joke is iffy to me. It is amusing but I don’t think Catholics would think so. In cases like that, I try to wonder if the people portrayed in the joke would find it amusing. If I don’t think they would, then I try to avoid it. On the other hand, I love the “Hello, Father” joke because it’s a play on words and involves only one priest’s bias; it doesn’t say anything against the Catholic church itself, like the “now their eyes are open!” line in the baptized puppy joke does.
This one is often attributed to J. Golden Kimball, and there is apparently some reason to assume it actually is one of his. The version told about him has a minister of the Church of Christ who says “Good morning, you sons of the Devil!” The response was a tip of the hat with “and a good morning to you father.” There is actually a long tradition of quick pithy comebacks that turn the original statement on its head. In Ireland they are called “pants.” When I shared this story with Henry Glassie, a noted folklorist, he said it had all the elements of a good pant and his Irish friends would have approved.
There are a number of theories about humor, and Glenn has done a good job of picking examples that highlight a number of them.
Daughter of Eve, I have heard some jokes that involve garments at critical points, not as an object of mockery, but rather as part of a humorous story (one of them involving garden sprinklers late at night had the punchline, “oh, did I mention that I was wearing only my garments?”). Would something like that bother you? I’m curious, as for some people any reference to garments in a context like that would be problematic, so it is a border case of humor.
One thing we find is that there is tremendous variability in what people think is funny and what they find offensive, and to some extent it depends on who is saying it. Over time I’ve found that some things I would have found terribly funny as a youth now are offensive to me, while things that would have offended me then strike me as terribly funny now.
However, DoE, I think you hit on a very important point, which is what is sometimes termed the principle of charity. Your humor should be something that anyone involved can laugh at, and should be something that someone can recognize themselves in. When carried out in this way humor can have a didactic value because it gets people to step outside their normal ways of thinking and see themselves in a new light.
PDoE, I agree with the culture/gospel divide. Although sometimes it’s tough to make that distinction, and for some people they are one in the same thing.
I went to a Faith and Fiction summer institute a few summers ago at St. John’s in Queens, NY — it was sponsored by Notre Dame and I was the lone “non-Member” of the group (about 30 people, all with at least some catholic background). I shared the first draft of my dissertation proposal (Mormon Humor) which included the puppy joke (and several other related jokes). They weren’t offended. They laughed. But they were laughing because of how typically Mormon it was — “of course it lifts Mormonism to a superior position, what do you expect?” That was their response.
Glenn, I’ll just point out that the kind of people at that symposium are a bit different in their ease and understanding of their and others’ faiths than the average Catholic. My husband is Catholic and both jokes make him uncomfortable. They don’t offend him but they don’t really strike him as funny either.
Fenevad — the kind of garment joke you mentioned wouldn’t bother me, I don’t think. I think it’s for a couple of reasons. 1) It uses “I.” It’s the old in-group, out-group thing. 2) It seems to use a normal life experience — you could replace “garments” with “underwear” and the joke would be essentially the same. It doesn’t make fun of the garments themselves.
The late Dick Shawn — who had no particular connection to the Church AFAIK — told this joke (more or less; I repeat it from memory) in a monologue on the “Tonight Show.” (I don’t remember the date, but I think it was after I joined the Church in 1982 and obviously before he died in 1987.)
The Pope’s secretary walks into the Pope’s office and says “Your Holiness, the Lord Jesus Christ is on the phone. He says He has some good news and some bad news.”
The Pope says, “Well, what’s the good news?”
The secretary says, “Well, He’s come again. There will be no more war or poverty, and everyone will live in peace and love forever.”
The Pope says, “That certainly is good news. But what’s the bad news?”
The secretary says, “He’s calling from Salt Lake City.”
The audience got the joke, and laughed loudly, but only after a long, long, beat. It took them a relatively long time to make the connections Salt Lake -> Mormon -> Jesus is a Mormon -> poor old Pope -> Ha-ha! It was an interesting sort of “crossover” joke, I think. An inside joke basically — the kind Mormons tell each other sometimes — yet it worked quite well with a non-Mormon audience. Indeed, it was probably funnier for being unexpected.
I think there’s a basic problem with garments and humor in America: garments are underwear, and underwear is intrinsically funny in this country. Thus, the mere concept of “sacred underwear” is quite funny in its incongruity. Statements like “My underwear is too sacred to joke about” or “Please stop making fun of my sacred underwear” are even funnier. And the more serious or offended we are when we say them, the funnier we are.
Kuri, Excellent point about the inongruity between “sacred” and “underwear.” So much of humor is based on incongruity. Let me revisit something I posted last week as an example:
Can you see the incongruities? First, you have the actions of the bishopric that are incongruous with our expectations of a bishopric. Second you have the “progression” of sins (coffee, cigar, beer — and whether or not drinking a beer is really more egregious than smoking a cigar, the structure of this joke would seem to suggest that at least some LDS people think so) followed by “gossip” which is incongruous with what is typically thought of as a “sin.” And third (because everything just naturally occurs in patterns of three), you have the incongruity of my interviewee who immediately laughed at the joke and then said it wasn’t funny. Studying the incongruities in humor is a good way to get a handle on the cultural expectations of a group of people.
[…] the previous post on Mormon humor, we saw the role that incongruity plays – we laugh because something is different than we expect […]
Just because something makes you laugh doesn’t mean you think it’s funny. I can see where the bishop you interviewed was coming from. It did tickle his funnybone but once he stopped to analyze what was said, he could no longer find it funny.
One thing to consider is that various people find different things funny. I suspect that my father, a former bishop, would have found this quite funny when he was a bishop, because he was always making similar jokes. For him I think it was an escape valve against the sometimes unrealistic expectations people have of bishops. So for him to juxtapose the (unrealistic) expectations for perfection versus the (hopefully unrealistic) notion of bishop out drinking beer would be a welcome and humorous way to point to the problems with both sides. He also loves poking fun at himself and uses such jokes as a way of keeping ahead of any pretension to greatness. Obviously he gets something out of these jokes other than what Glenn’s informant did.
In a similar vein I know a high-council member in another stake who used to drink beer before he joined the Church. Afterwards he would, on occasion, drink non-alchoholic beer. One time he went to a restaurant and ordered his favorite brand and remarked how good it was. Only after he polished it off did he notice it was the real thing. He went to his stake president and told him what had happened and the SP just laughed at him. He would quite regularly tell other people the story (even while subsequently serving as a bishop) and laugh at it. I suspect that Glenn’s informant, on the other hand, would not have gone around repeating this personal-experience narrative if it happened to him.
These different responses represent different personal attitudes and ways of coping with stressful environments. The fact that Glenn‘s informant would laugh at first and then conclude it was not funny shows that humor can work at various levels. I suspect that it was funny at one level for him (hence the initial laugh), but at another it was not, and in the end the one level won out over the other as the primary interpretation.
We are often ambivalent about humor. Quite frequently I will watch a movie and get to one of those “I can’t believe I’m laughing at something so stupid” moments in which I find something really funny, but also really stupid or even offensive. I often have a similar reaction to jokes that relate to sexual matters: they often are funny, but my Mormon, no-dirty-dokes, sex-is-not-to-be-discussed attitude also kicks in, so I experience both humor and offense simultaneously.
PDoE, What is the difference between “tickling the funnybone” and thinking something is “funny?” If laughter is not the recognition that something is funny, what is it?
I think in this ex-bishop’s case, he felt — upon further analysis –that it should not be funny — in fact, it should be offensive — but that doesn’t discount the initial, immediate reaction of laughter. If it had been a “fake laugh” where he was just trying to be kind, that would be one thing. But he really laughed.
I remember reading something that Eric Snider wrote that has stuck with me. He said that when he would tell a less than classy joke around his father, his dad would laugh and say “I’m laughing, but I’m not amused.” This was probably not original to Pappa Snider, but it is interesting given the discussion on this thread. Maybe sometimes we laugh in spite of our better sense of propriety, or even our sense of the sacred.
It’s interesting that one would even feel the need to make that distinction. What is it saying? What explains the laughter? Is he REALLY not amused, or is he communicating something else?
What it communicates to me is something like the following: “I know I shouldn’t think that’s funny, but it is.”
[…] see: Mormon Humor: Part I Mormon Humor: Part […]