From a rough, unfinished manuscript of mine:
Humor is in short supply among fanatics, and is something carefully avoided by most pretenders to sanctity. Yet George Q. Cannon remembered Joseph’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]
Professor King’s trust in Joseph Smith as a human being was essential to his eventual faith in the doctrines and practices restored through the Prophet: “Because Joseph Smith talked about his experiences in the way he did, I was able to believe him, and having that belief, I could then go on to say, ‘This man tells the truth; therefore, I ought to believe other things he tells me, even though I haven’t got the same evidence of those.’”[6]
[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.
[6] Arthur Henry King, “An Account of My Conversion,” in Arthur Henry King, Arm the Children: Faith’s Response to a Violent World (Provo: BYU Studies, 1998), 43.
***
A very nice article on, among other things, small local or neighborhood congregations and part-time clergy:
“The Power and Purpose of Small Community Churches”
And here’s something a bit strange — and not at all humorous — from the New Yorker, with some relevance to Mormonism and Utah:
“A Tale of Two Female Outcasts in the American Southwest”
Posted from Victoria, British Columbia
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