Then something happened.

Thirty years after the Sunstone readers rejected the “First Temptation of Christ” comic, and 20 years after Ed Snow wrote his “10 Commandments of Mormon Humor,” which explicitly forbade Sunstone from using deity in humor, Sunstone published a short story called “Jesus Christ (Almost) Visits the Mormons.”

Now, this wasn’t a cartoon, but it did have an accompanying illustration of a bishop offering a tie to a scowling Jesus. So there was a joke right there. With Jesus. Looking grumpy. And yet, we got no pushback on it. This may be because people rarely read fiction. And that would be a real bummer, because this story is comedy gold. You can find it here if you want to read it. But the fact that we got no pushback on that short story and its accompanying illustration makes me think that things have changed.

And then consider when the Book of Mormon play hit Broadway. Instead of being all uptight and righteous about it, the Church bought ad space in the playbill.

The ads said things like “You’ve seen the play; now read the book.” Another one said, “The book is always better.” This was a new thing: for the Church to use humor in its public-facing statements. Something had changed, not just with Sunstone readers, but with the Church generally. Is it that there is less solid ground now? Or has something else happened?

I’ll talk about some fascinating research on this subject in the next post.