By Jessica Warren

Making it through his speech this time without any evacuations, the world's only religious humor columnist advised that his wife provides the restrain in his life, "and she's not hear today."

The "Mormon version of weird" is what the Salt Lake Tribune's humor columnist Robert Kirby describes.

In the fourth session of the Media and Society Lecture Series, Kirby spoke about communicating ideas and the art of irony. Last year, just as he was ready to speak, the Taggart Student Center was evacuated in response to a fire alarm. This time the only chaos associated with his speech was his topic.

Equipped with his list of things he was not supposed to say, Kirby said he was puzzled when he was a police officer. In the right circumstances, he could do just about anything he wanted to do to people: arrest them, shoot them, put them in jail, seize their property and beat them up. But he "couldn't make fun of them."

He realized he wanted to write because he could get people's attention better than with a gun as a police officer.

"If you can get somebody to laugh," he said, "you have a much better chance of getting your point across."

Kirby said he has found that 20 percent of the population has "no functioning sense of humor." With the stumbling points in communication--going from thought, to word, to hearing it--his message doesn't always get across the way it is intended, he said.

He's received angry letters about his assumption that cats are going to hell and his wonderment of men inventing things like professional wrestling and impersonating Elvis. His point is, in fact, meant to be ironic, satirical and funny.

The title of his speech was "Satire: The Ultimate Idiot Safari." For him, if people get offended, his response is simply: "But my side's funnier."

He says that the rule to writing satire is you must be part of the joke. This way a lot more is tolerated, and you just take your cheap shots where you know you can get away with them, he said.

In his experience, Kirby has found that people tend to take offense for other people, such as whites being offended at discrimination of other races.

He gave the example of writing a column claiming that he could beat up the prophet of the Mormon Church, Gordon B. Hinckley, or even the pope if it came down to it. He was called in by higher authorities, but he ended up receiving a letter of congratulations from the prophet's own office.

Kirby admits that Mormons are weird, but so is everyone else.

"We are human beings first, and Mormons, Catholics and Jews a very distant second. We all have more in common than we don't," said Kirby.

When it comes to writing about the Mormon culture, he just goes to church. The hard part is knowing what to say and the best way of saying it, because "not everything is funny."

It all began with his column dealing with his description of the five types of Mormons: Liberal, Genuine, Conservative, Orthodox, and Nazi.

That kicked him out of a Provo newspaper and into the Tribune where he produces his irony and satire--the only columnist of his kind.

So he keeps on going along with books and as an occasional guest writer. He says people ask him when he is going to have his wife as a guest-writer to his column. To this he responds, "Go to hell. She's seen me naked."

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