Mormon Melodrama and the Syndication of Satire, fromBrigham Young(1940) toSouth Park(2003)

Abstract

All I know about Mormonism I learned from South Park . This is a statement familiar to many professors of religious studies and American history, and it has yielded countless groans among them. But there are good reasons not only for why South Park has come to such authoritative status among students but also for why it might be useful-rather than limiting, frustrating, or embarrassing-as a starting point for classroom discussions about religion and the media of cultural familiarity. South Park's utility for Latter-day Saints and their historians alike can be explained by way of exploring Mormon-Hollywood relations-and representative concerns in polygamy, melodrama, and satire-from the makings of the film Brigham Young (20th Century-Fox, 1940) to the 2000s. LDS Church and Hollywood personnel have struggled together to and through the revelation that Mormon history is sometimes most intelligible through satire. This means not merely that Mormon origin stories and developmental practices have been subject to mockery in early media and film, although this is undoubtedly a point of real concern, but also that they may only be understandable via a kind of winking portrayal that allows for the possibilities of winking in portrayal and of the knowing incorporation of critique.ISouth Park, the wildly popular animated series about adolescent life in a small Colorado town, has several times featured Mormon themes and characters, and it devoted one episode-All About (2003)-entirely to the subject of Mormonism.1 In this episode, South Park resident (and perpetually acerbic manchild) Stan visits the home of a new classmate named Gary, whereupon he is enveloped by the saccharine rituals of a Family Home Evening: pleasant dinner conversations, noncompetitive board games, Rice Krispies squares, affirming songs, and scripture readings from the Book of Mormon. (The... Book of Mormon? What's that?, asked Stan. You know... the book that Joseph Smith found, Gary answered. Who's Joseph Smith? Only the most important person in the world.) The episode plot then unfolds in a series of flashbacks showing Mormon prophet Joseph Smith discovering (buried in a hill) and translating (with a magical seer stone) the text of the Book of Mormon; and it depicts Joseph founding the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on the basis of its sacred existence and of Joseph's claims to visitation by God and Jesus. These flashbacks- themselves featuring the soundtrack refrain dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb for anyone who accepts Joseph's accounts and smart, smart, smart, smart for anyone who challenges them-are interspersed with present-day scenes depicting Stan and his family's sometimesappalled and sometimes-enthralled reactions to the story and the tenor of Gary's home life. By the end of the half-hour episode, Stan has grown increasingly upset by (what he takes to be) the lunacy of the LDS Church's origins tale and the doe-eyed credulity of his new neighbors, and he lashes out against them. You're right: the new kid's a douche, Stan reports to his South Park friends.All About does not end on this condemnatory note, however. The writers belie the apparent anti-Mormon feel of the episode at several points and in several ways, not least of these being the tenor of their satire itself. Humor here is derived not from outright ridicule, nor from egregious misrepresentation, but by combining historical correctness with political incorrectness (as when dumb, dumb sounds behind an accurate voicing of an accepted testimony), and also by oscillating between-and thus holding in tension-an ostensibly ludicrous past and a nevertheless laudable present, a world of seer stones and a world of familial nicety.2 Near the end of the episode, immediately following Stan's douche statement, Gary-the-Mormon enters the scene with an obscenity-capped retort of his own:Look, maybe us Mormons do believe in crazy stories that make absolutely no sense, and maybe Joseph Smith did make it all up, but I have a great life, and a great family, and I have the Book of Mormon to thank for that. …