My life in books

Me Funny, edited by Ojibway playwright and humorist Drew Hayden Taylor, is a collection of meditations and ruminations on the subject of Indigenous humour. Many of the contributors are Indigenous Canadians, writers and playwrights engaged in the creation of the very art which is the subject of the collection.

I found this collection among the Toronto Public Library's online ebook offerings. I was browsing their Indigenous section and somehow it seemed that after reading two books in quick succession that focused on the oppression of Indigenous peoples, I wanted to read something from the other side, something that looked at Indigenous survival - and what speaks more to the survival of a people and their culture than their laughter.

I was not completely unfamiliar with the territory when I chose this book - I've read some of the work of Drew Hayden Taylor, and Tomson Highway, and Thomas King before now, enough to have gotten a glimpse of what indigenous comedic writing can be like, and know that it makes me laugh, and makes me think. As did many of the contributions to this volume.

Among the working comics, writers and playwrights who share their perspectives are Ojibway stand-up comic Don Kelly, who offers thoughts on the nature of Indigenous comedy within the context of the Canadian comedy circuit, interspersed with excepts from his routines, and playwright Ian Ferguson, who talks about the differences between Indigenous humour intended for mixed audiences, and "our jokes" - humour by and for Indigenous peoples.

In "Whacking the Indigenous Funny Bone," Taylor provides some of his own perspectives on the nature of Indigenous humour, with particular focus on what has been one of the recurring themes of his own work, relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.

In "Ruby Lips," Louise Profeit-LeBlanc, a Northern Tutchone storyteller, offers a poignant story, sour and sweet, about her characters Johnny Silverfox and Mary Malcolm, who embody both the tragedy and the drive for survival that are so often interwoven in Indigenous life and literature.

Janice Acoosta (Cree/Métis) and Natasha Beeds (Cree/Afro-Caribbean) discuss "Cree-ative" comedy - with notable emphasis on the Trickster figure - in the form of a two-handed play/dialogue that veers wildly between interpersonal humour, satire, and detailed analysis of the comic writing of Cree writer Paul Seesequasis.

Cherokee writer and scholar Thomas King interleaves a discussion of the difficulties of defining Indigenous humour with passages from his popular CBC radio comedy show, The Dead Dog Cafe Comedy Hour.

In "Why Cree Is the Funniest of All Languages," an elegiac meditation on language and mythology, Tomson Highway talks about the soul - and the gut-level presence - of Indigenous humour.

Mohawk academic and parent Karen Froman, in "Buffalo Tales and Academic Trails" talks about her own uses of humour in teaching, both at the university level, and as a volunteer resource person on Indigenous issues at her children's school.

In one of the few pieces to address visual comedy, Alan J. Ryan's "One Big Indian," analyses both the creative process in Bill Powless' satirical paintings of Indigenous people, and the nature of public reaction to the paintings and the questions they raise about Indigenous representation for the white gaze.

Métis scholar Kristina Fagan's essay "Teasing, Tolerating, Teaching - Laughter and Community in Canadian Literature" examines the ways in which Indigenous writers have portrayed and used humour to strengthen community and cohesiveness - both by ambiguous example, and by teasing, even humiliation, as a form of coersion. She illustrates this through a discussion of the prevalence of the joker or jester figure - often an elder, but hardly a serious and sage advisor - who simultaneously defuses tension, transmutes fear or tragedy to laughter, and provides multiple lessons, sometimes contradictory or self-subversive, to be teased out of his or her words and actions.

As Mirjam Hirch notes in "Subversive Humour - Canadian Native Playwrights' Winning Weapon of Resistance," it has only been in recent decades that white observers were aware of the existence of Indigenous humour. Early writers on the subject depicted the indigenous peoples of North America as serious, placid or warlike by turns, but never funny. This view, however, has been thoroughly discredited with the emergence of a body of Indigenous humour, much of it expressed through theatre as the literary form closest to traditional storytelling forms. Hirch traces the roots of Indigenous humour from pre-colonial sacred rituals involving reversals and 'tricksters' and notes, as other contributors have, the importance of teasing in Indigenous cultures as a means of social control. She also talks, as others have, about how Indigenous people have used humour as a way to cope with and heal from trauma, and as a way of 'retaliating' against their oppressors without incurring punitive reaction.

Sprinkled throughout the volume are a series of jokes that the editor has written/collected/curated under the collective title "Astutely Selected Ethno-Based Examples of Cultural Jocularity and Racial Comicalness."

I don't know if I could do any better defining Indigenous humour now than I could before reading this, but I certainly enjoyed it, and more than one passage left me smiling, even laughing. Maybe that's the best reason for reading it.