Jared Farmer on the Book of Mormon musical: "awesomely lame"

[_moksha]

Blixa most likely has the sweetest voice on the L train.

[_Baker]

I can imagine late-night Brooklyn bound has a lot of singers on the L. Unfortunately, I suffer the E train mostly - although there is some good talent performing on the 42nd St. platform.

[_malaise]

nvm

[_Kishkumen]

Jared Farmer's review is a mixed bag for me, but then so too is Stone & Parker's work. Sometimes they do tread into the territory of negative stereotypes. Farmer was right on the money when he related the representation of Africans in the Book of Mormon musical to the Starvin' Marvin episodes on South Park, which represent Africans in a kind of The Gods Must Be Crazy way. Still, I have never seen anything Stone & Parker have done that did not at least make me reflect. It doesn't always tickle my funny bone, but what can?

Awesomely lame, though? I simply can't agree. I think it is true that the musical is garnering the degree of critical attention it is because it is a weak season, but that does not mean it is "lame." It is probably exactly what one would expect of Parker & Stone doing a musical, which would mean it will not be a classic, but it was entertaining while it lasted and certainly not bad.

I can't help but think that the "lame" judgment ultimately boils down to Mormon hypersensitivity about how Mormon identity is represented by non-Mormons. I don't agree that the Church simply ignored the musical. Otterson's letter to the editor was "lame" in my opinion. It was another one of those uninformed swipes that religionists often take at a comic representation of a religious topic. Think of the Christian response to Monty Python's Life of Brian. What they wisely did not do was go on a crusade over it. And that decision has as much to do with the huge PR flop of their crusade for Prop 8 as anything else, I would wager.

As I said in response to a Facebook thread, one should no more expect Stone & Parker to provide an accurate portrayal of Mormon theology than Monty Python's Life of Brian to teach accurate history. Comedy is about different kinds of truths than fidelity to doctrinal or historical facts.

[_EAllusion]

I was worried of being spoilerered by the review, but it's more or less safe for someone who has listened to the songs.

I have two comments.

1) Parker and Stone's main talent is taking worn-out tropes and cliches and satirizing them while simultaneously being entertaining examples of them. A sub-type of that talent is using minority stereotypes to both mock the stereotype in the first place and to work the minority trope for jokes. Either you get they are doing that or you don't. And if you get it, you're either gonna like it or not.

The first example that pops to mind is "Big Gay Al" from early South Park. Big Gay Al is at the same time a send-up of the swish stereotype of gays and an opportunity for some good swish jokes. A more recent example in the same vain would be Mr. Queermo. Starvin' Marvin is the same thing as applied to downtrodden Africans. I willing to bet that's exactly what is being done in the Book of Mormon musical. I don't think cultural realism is the aim. They're working within an established cliché' about Africans that probably is intended to both be an entertaining example of that cliché' and a send-up of its existence in the first place. Just a hunch.

2) I also find it annoying that they can't hire a few fact-checkers to get some basic ethnographic details about Mormons and their religion right. They get the spirit of it so well that those mistakes simply should not happen. It's like a symphony with the occasional jarring, missed note.

That being said, plenty of Mormons I've met conceptualize spirit prison/hell so closely to contemporary depictions of hell that I find "Spooky Mormon Hell Dream" as a plausible parody song of what a Mormon might think. That Mormons think spirit prison is a temporary, pre-judgment place does not mean Mormons don't believe in hell as a scary place.