This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
When The Book of Mormon opened on Broadway in March 2011, it arrived with an obvious problem built into its premise: a musical comedy written by the creators of South Park, about two Latter-day Saint missionaries failing to convert a Ugandan village, is not a project that sounds friendly to the church it names in its title. Trey Parker, Robert Lopez and Matt Stone did not soften the satire. The missionaries' training is mocked, their doctrine is mocked, and the show's single most quoted number stages Joseph Smith's founding vision as slapstick.
What actually happened is not what that premise predicts. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued a brief, measured statement the same week the show opened: "The production may attempt to entertain audiences for an evening, but the Book of Mormon as a volume of scripture will change people's lives forever by bringing them closer to Christ." No condemnation, no legal threat, no boycott call. That restraint became the seed of something stranger still. When the production toured, the Church bought advertising space inside the show's own Playbill programs, running lines like "You've seen the play, now read the book" and "The book is always better," turning a Broadway audience already laughing at LDS missionaries into an audience being invited, cheerfully, to go meet the real thing.
Public relations commentators and news outlets covering the campaign have called it good natured rather than defensive, and the framing has stuck: a tradition being satirized on a stage it did not choose, answering not with outrage but with its own sense of humor, aimed at bringing curious ticket holders one step closer to the source material the show was joking about all along.