Humor and forthrightness helped early Latter-day Saints disponse of contradictions, conflicts, and frustrations in a socially healthy manner.  There was, for them, no conflict between piety and moderate levity, reverence and straightforward candidness.  The documents of church history are replete with missionary stories, occasional pranks, and the betowal of nicknames as a means of deflating pretension, hypocrisy, vanity, and excessive pride.  They also contain celebrations of the goodness of God, the complexity of the world he created and the sublimity of the life he gives.  The early Saints' sense of balance between candid humor and reverence did not undermine their faith, but instead gave them a strong sense of group identity and illustrated the strengths of their movement.  Devotion to their cause allowed such balance.  More generally, it helped them develop the evolving self-respect that one would expect of a community of God's chose people.

-Leonard J. Arrington, Adventures of a Church Historian (pg. 8)