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"Hi, I'm Brother Jake." An image of a smiling white man in white shirt and tie flashes across the screen as I watch yet another edition of the "Brother Jake" YouTube video channel. Brother Jake, described by one YouTube commenter as "the Stephen Colbert of Mormon satire," carries a growing audience through fallacious explanations of controversial or historically problematic aspects of Mormonism. These explanations are presented as "Brother Jake Explains:" followed by video titles covering a number of dicey issues including "polygamy," "Mormonism is not a cult," "Church discipline," "Mormons are not racist," and "Prophets are awesome." Similar to other satirical explanations of church culture from within the Mormon ranks (such as the "Dictionary of Correlation" by anthropologist Daymon Smith), Brother Jake's material jocularly occupies a liminal space, protected by online anonymity, where questioning, frustrated, or transitional Mormons dialogue with one another and true believing members (often labeled TBMs for short).1
The particular video I am watching this day mockingly refers to that latter demographic. Entitled "True Believing Mormon Dude," this video is a departure for Brother Jake. Rather than his typical fast-paced narration and hokey collages, Brother Jake sets this story to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General" from Pirates of Penzance (1879).2 Images flash across the screen as Brother Jake patters:
I feel weird when people talk about my Mormon underwear And when I go to church I dress real nice and shave my facial hair. And even though you might be thinking "this guy is a giant prude," It's no big deal because I am a true-believing Mormon dude.3
Gilbert and Sullivan's "modern major general" is a bumbling and laughable buffoon whose naïve, self-deprecating words have charmed audiences for generations. Brother Jake's caricature of faithful Mormon men exploits Mormons' special affinity for musical theater. In other words, if Brother Jake's video complicates an easy response, it's because Mormon cultural offense is mixed with a Mormon cultural virtue. Mormons and musical theater have long maintained an open courtship. From local ward roadshows to the Hill Cumorah Pageant and from the Polynesian Cultural Center to Saturday's Warrior, Mormons have found in musical theater a remarkable means of self-expression and identity that is probably...