South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone talk musicals, missionaries and what keeps them coming back for more Mormons.

What is it about Mormons? “You can see we’re obsessed,” laughs Trey Parker in the Princess Theatre, Melbourne, where the hit musical Book of Mormonis enjoying its premiere Australian run. The show, a musical comedy that tells the story of Mormon missionaries thrown into the deep end of war-torn Uganda, has come to Australia after hugely successful seasons on Broadway and London’s West End and picking up a swathe of awards. I’m chatting with Parker and his Book of Mormonco-creator Matt Stone in the lead up to the premiere.

“First of all, we’re from Colorado, that’s where it comes from – there’s a lot of Mormons in Colorado,” Parker says. “We were kind of surprised when we came to LA and people didn’t know anything about Mormons.” “It’s the culture we knew a lot about,” agrees Stone.

Stone and Parker have featured Mormon characters and plots a number of times in their long-running animated comedy, South Park, and even more prominently in their 1997 film Orgazmo– a superhero movie in which a Mormon missionary becomes entangled in the LA pornography industry. So what is it that keeps them coming back for more Mormons?