So, for our first 100 years, Mormons wanted all the ground to be stable. We might think of the Nauvoo Mormons draining the swamp so that they could have solid ground to build their houses on. We can also think of them trekking across the prairie to get to Salt Lake City where they could …
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 …
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, …
As I asked in the previous post, can we make an argument that there should be such a thing as “solid ground” in a culture—unjustified, but immovable points? Interestingly, I think there is. For two reasons. One is cultural, and one is humorous. First, from a cultural standpoint, the reason that a culture is coherent …
Sunstone’s first ad appeared in its first issue. And, of course, it was about Sunstone, advertising our second Mormon history calendar. A mere five dollars! We have an original shrink-wrapped copy preserved behind bullet-proof glass in the Sunstone office. Issue two was ad-free. But issue three really got going with four ads. The first one …
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 …
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 …
