On Joseph’s sense of humor

Humor is in short supply among fanatics, and is something carefully avoided by most pretenders to sanctity. Yet George Q. Cannon remembered Joseph Smith’s “sense of gentle humor.”[1] Likewise, his modern biographer Robert Remini, a preeminent scholar of Jacksonian America and a non-Mormon, writes that he “came to like the man very much,” not only because he possessed “compelling charisma, charm, persuasiveness,” but partly because Joseph Smith was “joyously funny.” “I like them when they’re funny. Andrew Jackson was not funny.”[2]

There is perhaps even a trace of humor apparent in his mother’s recollection of his return home after his First Vision. Leaning against the fireplace, he answers his mother’s concerned question about what is wrong: “I have learned for myself,” she recalls him saying, “that Presbyterianism is not true.”[3] Rather an understatement of what had just occurred. But, notes Professor King, “We have to remember that his mother had joined the Presbyterian Church shortly before this. How do you assess that as a conversation between a fourteen-year-old and his mother? All mothers know that sort of thing really happens to them with their teenagers.”[4] Nonetheless, Joseph’s mother, Lucy Mack Smith, remembered him at the age of fourteen as “a remarkably quiet, well disposed child,” although she insists that, prior to that age, there was nothing unusual in his childhood.[5]

[1] Cannon, Life of Joseph Smith the Prophet, 342.

[2] As quoted by Dennis Lythgoe, “Writer finds ‘his Joseph,’” Salt Lake City Deseret News (13 October 2002), E10.

[3] Joseph Smith – History 1:20.

[4] King, “Joseph Smith as a Writer,” 291.

[5] Lucy’s Book, 329.

Posted from Mentor, Ohio