The Book of Mormon is toothless, jokeless, plotless and pointless

Impossible, surely. The Book of Mormon could never live up to the accolades lavished on it by America’s critics. ‘Blissfully original, outspoken, irreverent and hilarious,’ was a typical review. The three authors are formidably gifted. Trey Parker and Matt Stone gave us South Park, while Robert Lopez is the co-writer of Avenue Q. As a fan of both shows, I was fearful that Mormon would turn out to be as much fun as underwater paintballing.

So, up goes the curtain. A posse of geeky Yanks in crisp white shirts are being dispatched to Mormon missions around the world. We focus on two characters, a big handsome jock and a fat needy blob. Their destination is revealed: Uganda. Everyone is shocked and sad. They reach Africa — a CNN version of the Third World — which heaves with squalor and creepy-crawlies but hasn’t the slightest trace of religious culture. Odd that. Never mind. At the local Mormon mission, our characters sing songs that gently mock their faith and allude to rumours that some Mormons might be gay. The Africans also sings songs about their best-known shortcomings. This establishes the show’s motifs. Believers make jokes about the silliness of belief. Africans make jokes about the silliness of Africa. Both groups are portrayed as charming simpletons although the Africans are blessed with a strain of knowing cynicism that the Mormons lack. The audience, too, is expected to share their worldly sophistication. So when the Africans sing, ‘eighty per cent of us have Aids’, the audience feels safe tittering at the disease because it’s the diseased who began tittering first. Fair enough.