In 2015, Lynn Gorton Cropper published an article in Sunstone titled, “Laughs Precede the Miracle.” She starts with two studies.

The first study, “Humor and Group Effectiveness,” (2008), concludes that successful group humor can create an attitude of psychological safety for the group members, enabling them to feel less defensive when faced with tension and giving them the emotional resources to find creative solutions.

A 2010 study, “The Wheel Model of Humor: Humor Events and Affect in Organizations,” concludes that positive humor events can spread from an individual to a group in a wheel-like pattern, producing positive cumulative effects. Both articles argue that successful group humor causes individual and group change over time, and alters how the group functions both internally and externally.

Interestingly, it is not necessary for all members of a group to experience the initial humor event in order to be influenced by it. Just a few group members experiencing the humor event can be enough to get the humor cycle moving.

Successful humor events are most effective when three conditions are met:

Both the humor creator and the humor appreciator are from the same group.

The humor events come in a series or in clusters.

The humor events create a humor-conducive environment that spawns more humor events over time.

And then she connects the Cal Grondahl books published by Sunstone, along with cartoon books by Pat Bagley, to the church’s marketing in the Book of Mormon playbill. These early humor events created a psychologically safe space for Mormons to encounter their cultural problems.

She notes particularly a Grondahl cartoon where an ancient American man is inscribing on the golden plates as he talks to a king who has stopped by in his chariot to chat. “I wrote in the plates that we Nephites have horses,” the man says. “I hope you didn’t mention their size?” says the king. And, indeed, the horses are the size of tapirs.

These kinds of cartoons, she argues, gave Mormons permission to think about cultural difficulties in creative ways. If we stick with the “solid ground” metaphor, we could say that these cartoons poked holes in solid ground—but for the same reason that we poke holes in our lawns each year. The soil in lawns that are not aerated becomes too dense, too compact for the grass to grow well. The same thing happens in cultures. They need to be aerated to stay healthy. Aeration is the job of the humorist.

And Mormonism is definitely one of those cultures that is too tightly packed. When we talk about hot-button issues, such as Book of Mormon historicity, Book of Mormon translation, Joseph Smith’s prophethood, the truthfulness of the Church, we tend to see it as a black-and-white issue. As Gordon Hinckley proclaimed in 2003, “All that we have, all that we do, hinge on the truth of that account of the boy Joseph Smith. If it is true, then everything that we have in this Church is true and is more precious and worth more than anything else on earth. If it is false, we are engaged in the greatest fraud that was ever perpetrated on earth.”

And then we add the domino theory to it. It says something like, if the book of Mormon is true then Joseph Smith is a prophet, and if Joseph Smith was a prophet then the church he established was the true church. So, if one of those tiles gets knocked down, it knocks over everything else. Everything was connected and everything had to be standing. This is especially a problem nowadays when it is so easy to come across the valid arguments made against various truth claims. The ground cannot be stable all the way around anymore.

Cal Grondahl and Pat Bagley started publishing their cartoons when the New Mormon History was getting started, which challenged a lot of the solid-ground narratives Mormonism had about itself—the things Mormons had been trained to think of as either true or false. But that put us in a position where we could not interact with the issues—only reject them.

Grondahl and Bagley’s contribution to Mormon culture is that their cartoons subtly let us know that there were more ways to think about these issues. They trained us to aerate our cultural ground so that we could think more creatively.

For example, with Moroni’s head is sticking out of the hat telling Emma about the seer stone’s batteries, we’re given a completely different filter to think through. And in the moment of laughter, our view of the event fractures, helping us realize—rightly—that the situation was more complicated than either the critics or the apologists can know. This plausible absurdity aerates the ground and gives us room to grow a little differently. And we may find that we didn’t want certitude as much as we wanted the ability to grow. We want room to be creative as well.

But let’s take this one more step. Follow me to the next post.