Do you like to laugh at nuns?

In real life, nuns aren’t all that funny. But during the holiday season, Twin Citians invariably flock to shows featuring various forms of nun- and church-based hilarity. This year, the Twin Cities will arguably be the center of the religious-humor universe, with three shows—two of them world premieres—cashing in on people’s desire to laugh at women who, for many, represent nothing less than the haunting specter of moral and educational discipline. Funny stuff, that.

For starters, Chanhassen Dinner Theatres is featuring the eighth and latest installment of the ridiculously popular Nunsense series, Nunset Boulevard: The Nunsense Hollywood Bowl Show. Across town, at the Ordway, audiences will be yucking it up with Sister, the no-nonsense nun who presides over the one-woman show Sister’s Christmas Catechism. And at the Plymouth Playhouse, the third installment of the Basement Ladies series, Away in a Basement: A Church Basement Ladies Christmas—a show the writer of the series, Greta Grosch, calls “Nunsense with aprons”—is receiving its world premiere as well.

These shows have several things in common: funny women, cornball jokes, silly songs, absurd situational humor, a certain irreverence for reverence—and, almost assuredly, packed houses throughout their runs. In the middle of September, 80 percent of the tickets for Plymouth Playhouse’s Away in a Basement had already been sold, and the theater had yet to do a lick of advertising. Chanhassen Dinner Theatres’ Nunsense Boulevard is building on a franchise that has produced 8,000 productions in 26 countries and grossed more than half a billion dollars worldwide. Indeed, the Nunsense series—which includes Nunsense II, Nunsense III: Sister Amnesia’s Country Western Nunsense Jamboree, Nuncrackers, Meshuggah-Nuns, Nunsensations—The Nunsense Vegas Revue, and an all-male version called Nunsense A-Men—is arguably the most popular series in theater history. Maripat Donovan’s Sister series (Sister’s Christmas Catechism is the third show in a series of four) is no slouch, either—it’s been running in Chicago for 17 years, and is the longest-running one-woman show in the Windy City’s history.

Even Dan Goggin, the creator and writer of Nunsense, isn’t quite certain why his shows are so popular. “There is such a mystery about nuns,” he ventures. “They’re people, of course, but they’re also like aliens, so when you put them in certain situations, it’s funny.” In Nunset Boulevard, for example, the franchise’s five nuns get invited to perform at The Hollywood Bowl, only to discover upon their arrival in Hollywood that the venue is really a bowling alley. As longtime fans know, these nuns will do just about anything, but the one strict rule Goggin adheres to when conceiving the shows is no preaching. “None of the shows has anything to do with religion,” he says. “We are going for laughs.”

Donovan, the co-creator of Sister’s Christmas Catechism, takes a different path to merry mirthmaking. She turns the theater into a parochial classroom that the acerbic Sister rules with lashes of her razor tongue as she enlists the audience’s help in applying the “principles of forensic science” to uncover “the mystery of the Magi’s gold.” Along the way, audience members get admonished for chewing gum, learn a little esoteric Christmas lore, and many—up to a dozen—end up onstage in an uproarious version of the Nativity.

“Sister is me if I were a nun,” says Donovan. “Nobody laughs at Sister. She is not a buffoon. She’s a real person. She reminds a lot of people of teachers they had when they were kids, so in many ways it’s a memory play—one in which everyone gets to laugh their ass off.”

Nostalgia plays an even larger role in the Basement Ladies series, written by Greta Grosch, which puts a Lutheran spin on things. Like Nunsense, there are five principal basement ladies around which all the plays revolve, and the attraction, says Grosch, is the strength of the characters and the degree to which people identify with the basement ladies and the period of history they inhabit. “People just fall in love with these characters and keep coming back to see what will happen to them in new situations,” says Grosch. “Going to these shows is like going down memory lane. They remind people of things their mother or grandmother said or did—things they may have forgotten.”

A great deal of effort is put into making the dialogue references and set historically accurate, says Grosch. “The environment is 1959, so the kitchen appliances are vintage, there’s old Tupperware, they wear three- and four-buckle boots, and we pay attention to things like who drinks Sanka and whether they’ve heard of Tang. It takes people back.”

All three shows open in early November, so if you’re the sort of person who likes to laugh at Lutheran busybodies and the shenanigans of nuns, get your tickets fast—because, apparently, there are a lot of you out there. Nunset Boulevard opens Nov. 6, Chanhassen Dinner Theatres, 501 W. 78th St., Chanhassen, 952-934-1500; Sister’s Christmas Catechism runs Nov. 17–Dec. 27, Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, 345 Washington St., St. Paul, 651-224-4222, ordway.org; Away in a Basement: A Church Basement Ladies Christmas opens Nov. 5, Plymouth Playhouse, 2705 Annapolis Ln. N., Plymouth, 763-553-1600, plymouthplayhouse.com