I Just... I Mean I Can't...

Church signs can make me cringe sometimes.  You might think that I would be cool with people cleverly sloganizing Christian themes, but I think, and maybe this is getting worse as time goes on, I'm not.
I saw the following phrase on a church sign this morning on my way to drop my daughter off at school: "Body Piercing Saved My Life."  I had a physiological response to it, want to know what it was?  Picture your grandparents getting "frisky."
I'm trying to track down exactly what it is about these signs that makes me sort of clench up.  I think I have a pretty good sense of humor.  I don't really mind at all when people tell a good joke, even when that joke involves the peculiarities of church or faith.  I have seen church signs on the internet that were actually good, but I wonder how far they had to travel to find them. Most of the church signs and Christian bumper stickers I see out there range from blah to blech.
I have come to prefer church signs that just do boring old sign work: tell us something about something.  It's not that I don't believe you can really get a good zinger up on the old board sometimes, there is anecdotal evidence that you can, it's just that I think humor is so very subjective and it can go wrong so easily.  One of my homiletics professors cautioned us against being too clever with our sermon titles because there is a danger of being "pornographic," because it profanes. trivializes and mocks something that is supposed to be sacred (as pornography does with sexuality).
For instance, the clever little gag about body piercing, referencing Jesus crucifixion.  First off, emphasizing the rather brutal notion that the brutality of Christ's death is somehow the vehicle of salvation rather than the very fact of his life, and moreover the reality of his resurrection is sort of dire and grim soteriology to be sure.  But even if you're not going there exactly, there is also the fact that crucifixion is decidedly one of the least funny things that have ever happened on the face of the earth.  There are some things that just shouldn't be joked about, some things so brutal and evil that humor cannot break through.  Gallows humor has to walk right up to the edge of morbidity and brutality and sort of laugh into the void, but sometimes one loses their balance.
There's an old joke: "Jesus walks into a hotel, hands the concierge three nails and says, 'can you put me up for the night?'"   Hah, sort of, not actually very funny, but also not particularly offensive, because everything about it shouts, "this is a stupid joke."  It's funny because it's stupid, and a little vulgar, but somehow the vulgarity is toned down by the non-pretentious context of a vaudeville/burlesque presentation.
Church signs on the other hand tend to shout: "Take us seriously!"  The humor in this context is tinged with the seriousness of people being "saved."  The gravitas of faith and spirituality can make for some good jokes to be sure, but good religious humor has to have a very special tone.  You can poke fun at the human part of church, you can laugh about cantankerous old "saints," you can poke fun at the silly way we sometimes handle Scripture, you can get a good laugh at misapprehensions, i.e. Monty Python's The Life of Brian, "Blessed are the cheesemakers."
In fact, Python's send up of first century Judea, is rather hilarious, it just oozes sacrilege, but they're standing off to the side as critics and scoffers, not trying to be funny from within the walls of a church.  And maybe that's what makes the difference for me at least.  The pathos fails.  I'm looking at those signs and thinking, "what are they thinking?"  I'm wondering if they get the fact that their cleverness and their sense of humor is just off.  I'm wondering, if I, as an insider to this Christianity thing, am a little skeeved by the clumsy attempt at being funny, what do outsiders think?  Is this presenting the Gospel? or is this making a mockery of it?
Would I be offended, for instance, if Monty Python made some sort of body piercing joke in one of their skits about Jesus?  Probably not, I would expect that sort of morbid humor from them.
Maybe there's a key to this back in the idea of pornography.  No one who has experienced an actual, healthy sexual relationship would find anything about pornography to be realistic, but someone who has not experienced a healthy relationship might get all sorts of bad ideas.  If you don't know what "real" people look like without their clothes on, and you expect your actual girlfriend to look like a Playboy model, without understanding about airbrushing and such, you're going to have some problems with intimacy, and you may really hurt some feelings.
Art is full of nudity, but it's not pornography, mostly because artists are portraying the beauty of the natural world rather than trying to make something that is salacious.  You might notice in old paintings that naked bodies come in all shapes and sizes, sometimes, as in the work of Goya for instance, the bodies are rather less than perfect.
Humor is a form of art, it points out our imperfections, and it helps us also see beauty.  Pornography mostly fails to be art because it points us to a false sort of intimacy/beauty, it presents sex as sordid and silly rather than as intimate and loving.
Trying to present the reality of a relationship with God and what it means to really follow Christ in a few dozen characters on a sign board is an absolutely impossible task.  Perhaps lampooning the brutality of crucifixion is not the best way for people to be drawn towards the nuances of various perspectives of atonement, perhaps threats about damnation, no matter how hidden behind sarcasm are not the best way to call disciples to your community.
I'm still not sure I have a handle on all this, but for now, I'm going to keep our signs pretty simple.