Walker sent me a pointer to this post from Steve Sailer’s weblog, in which he highlights a comment about the number of Mormon medical students one of his readers encountered, and how they are all so much cut from the same cloth. But there’s alot more in Steve’s post. First of all, the reader’s comment was in response to a parallel observation Steve had made about ‘Mormon Hollywood’ and in particular the ‘Mormon humor’ in the film Napoleon Dynamite (which I haven’t seen). Steve talked about the number of people in the screening laughing at jokes he didn’t get. Is the popularity of …Dynamite planting some sort of Mormon meme in teenage culture, as he implies. And I wish he had given us an example of a Mormon joke, since I would have been one of those in the audience who were clueless, I imagine.

The reader concerned about the Mormons in his medical school observes that he is encountering them everywhere in the medical world. He was beginning to surmise that the straight arrow Mormon lifestyle lent itself to a professional career path and that there are just too many professionals in Utah to hope to get a good job. That and the fact that Mormon families are having more children than the rest of the U.S. population is leading to pressure toward a diaspora of Mormons. The commenter concludes that,

“Everyone knows about the large number of Jews and Indians in medicine, but in a few years there will be a massive number of these guys too. And you probably won’t even notice it because they’ll be unassuming Northern European average white guys with nondescript last names like “Smith” and “Young.””

Now I know that Mormonism originated back east but I don’t see much evidence of it here in New England, which I assumed was because our provincialism and liberality were less hospitable ground for them. In particular, I haven’t encountered many Mormons in the academic or medical world (except for the anthropologist who was my undergraduate thesis advisor, but he was an anomaly in many ways). Could it be that they just fly below the radar, as the commenter suggests? What are your experiences with whether you notice them among you in the settings you haunt? Do I have any readers who would identify themselves as Mormons and could comment on this? I read Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven several years ago and found it a terrifying revelation about Mormonism in America, but it was focused on the fundamentalist Mormons and radical polygamists much more than the proliferating mainstream of the faith. That new HBO series (which does not seem worth watching) sounds like sitcom-level voyeurism into the polygamous lifestyle rather than much insight into the sociological phenomenon. What say you? And don’t forget to comment on what “Mormon humor” might be…