This brings us back to our question about whether Moroni’s head sticking out of a hat crosses onto sacred ground. I’m going to try to answer that by using a story from J. Golden Kimball.

He writes that he was once approached by a woman who told him that she had two brothers. One of them was an excellent Mormon and an excellent man. He raised a righteous family, he did a lot of church service, and then one day he was struck down by lightning. Meanwhile, her other brother had done not a day of work in his life, did not participate in church, and drank and chased women. Yet he was still alive. “Why would God allow this to happen?” she asked. Golden says he thought about some way of consoling her. What he finally came up with was “Well, sister, God didn’t want your jackass brother around more than you do!”

The most obvious level of the joke is that a general authority uses coarse language. The other is that an all-loving God apparently is not completely all-loving (though, of course, according to the current administration, Mormons don’t believe that anyway). But the most interesting thing about the story is how the woman reacts. She throws her arms around Kimball and says, “That is the best answer I have ever received.” So, the coarse language did not bother her; neither did the reinterpretation of God’s character. In fact, none of it bothered her. She loved it. Why?

If we look at the story closely, we see that Kimball was basically supporting everything that she had just said, but in an unexpected way. He told her that her beloved brother was indeed the better brother. That her love of him was justified. That God loved him. And it also supported the entire Mormon worldview of there being a God in heaven and righteousness being an important aspect of one’s life. It was a supportive joke.

So, the surface of a joke can be one thing and the foundation another. Though the joke’s surface may seem to fracture the sacred, the foundation can end up supporting it.

We can apply this to the cartoon about Moroni’s head in the hat. On the surface, it is funny that he is sticking his head out of a hat and that the seer stone runs on batteries. But none of it implies that the translation of the Book of Mormon didn’t happen. The cartoon’s assumptions are all orthodox.

So, with that, let’s get back to our original question: what can be the subject of humor and what can’t? First, we’ll need to set down some definitions, which I will do in the next post.