The first thing to take away from The Book of Mormon, the Broadway musical put on by the creators of the cartoon television program South Park, is this: Obscenity is dead. The second thing is this: Blasphemy is dead. If you’re in the épater le bourgeois racket, you’re going to have to come up with something better.

Watching The Book of Mormon, I was reminded of an event I was at a few months ago that featured one of those old-fashioned, neo-retro burlesque performances—feathers and such. How much titillation is there to be had from Gypsy Rose Lee or Lili St. Cyr in an age absolutely saturated with pornography? Not very much. Hanna, a current action movie, includes a lesbian-sex tease between two girls who are intended to be about fourteen years old—rated PG-13, this was, with an Oscar-winning actress in the cast, not something at one of those old Times Square coin-operated cinemas. Unhappily for Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the middle-aged adolescents behind this play, obscenity and blasphemy are pretty much the only two tools in their toolbox. (I like to imagine that the duo employ a division of labor, Mr. Parker for the profanity, Mr. Stone for the blasphemy. Perhaps that is how they do it.) You don’t come to them for finely crafted plots or living characters. There is simply no charge to their game anymore. There is something very, very tired at the center of this enterprise, and it’s not