Let’s take a quick break to make sure everyone reading this is living up to BYU standards. Please compare yourself to the righteous people pictured in this informational poster. I’m very disappointed in all of you. Where’s your sports jacket, Mister? And I don’t see enough Aquanet in that hair, Sister! Another thing I found …
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 …
Above the resurrected beings is deity. And this is one place where Sunstone readers made their views known. Sunstone reprinted this comic in 1989 from the Wittenberg Door, a magazine of Christian satire. According to editor Elbert Peck, Sunstone received a barrage of complaints about this cartoon—though none of them got into the letters to …
So, the next step up is, do we publish humor about founding leaders? For example, this cartoon about why Martin Harris was Joseph’s scribe only briefly. This is one of the very few cartoons I could find about Joseph Smith published in Sunstone. It seems that, for the most part, we stayed away from pictorial …
One of the most interesting questions you can ask about a culture is what it considers to be within the realm of humor. What subjects and people can humor be about? Where is sacred ground—where humor is not allowed—and where is mundane ground—where it is? As Sunstone started its humor career, it stuck mainly with …
The Sunstone Review reviewed what may be the earliest instance of gay Mormon theater, “Emmett: A One-Mormon Show,” written and performed by Emmett Foster, which was staged in 1983 at The Public House in New York City. Emmett’s mother has been married nine times. His sister tries to hide her smoking habit while she ogles missionaries. …
by Larry Menlove Elder Bicknell and Elder Vanguard looked down at the hard-pack road. The old woman’s legs—thin, white, and spider-veined—stuck out from under her pale green housedress, which had scrunched up high around her thighs owing to the throes and contortions she had undergone. Standing over their bicycles, hands gripping the tape of their …
“Every member a missionary.” You’ve probably heard this phrase more times than you can count. But what you probably don’t know is that it has its roots in the silent films Trapped by the Mormons and Married to a Mormon. Winifred Graham was one of the most ardent anti-Mormons in Britain. She had written two …
So, with that, let’s get back to our original question: what can be the subject of humor and what can’t? It seems to me that a good term to use for that which cannot be the subject of humor is “solid ground.” But when I say solid ground, I don’t mean “the parts of a …
The first 100 years of Mormonism produced almost zero published humor. The closest thing we have is Parley P. Pratt’s short story about Joseph Smith meeting the devil. And, of course, it was meant as proselytizing material. You would be completely within your rights to point out that J. Golden Kimball contributed a lot of …
