January 13, 2022 43
The book jumps around chronolog-
ically, as the early chapters on Fixico
and Rogers alternate with ones about
Native comedians of the more recent
past and the present. It also hopscotches
North America geographically. One of
its pleasures is reading about the places
in which the present- day comedians
first heard the call. For Dakota Ray
Hebert, a Dené of the English River
First Nation, it happened in the town
of Meadow Lake in northwestern Sas-
katchewan, where she listened to tapes
of Bill Cosby on her Walkman. Adri-
anne Chalepah, the Kiowa Apache,
often watched Monty Python’s Flying
Circus with her family while moving
between small Oklahoma towns like
Anadarko and Cache. In the pulp and
paper mill town of Fort Frances, On-
tario, north of the Red Lake and Leech
Lake Reservations, Ojibwe comedian
Ryan McMahon remembers as a child
seeing the grown- ups laughing at Eddie
Murphy’s Deliri ous. The experience
“sent [him] on the trajectory” that led
to a life in comedy.
Drew Lacapa, son of a White Moun-
tain Apache father, herded cattle with
his five brothers near Whiteriver, Ari-
zona, and watched The Carol Burnett
Show and The Red Skelton Hour. Also
from Arizona, Sierra Teller Ornelas,
a self- described “sixth generation Na-
vajo tapestry weaver,” whose family
lived “rug to rug,” remembers watch-
ing videocassettes of Richard Pryor,
George Carlin, Steve Martin, Johnny
Carson, and Saturday Night Live while
her mother wove. Ornelas went on to
become a writer and producer of sit-
coms in Los Angeles. Unfortunately,
we’re not told what in particular about,
say, Murphy’s or Burnett’s comedy at-
tracted these devotees.
Charlie Hill, the most successful
Native American comedian of the
network- TV era, who performed on The
To night Show, Late Night with David
Letterman, and The Richard Pryor
Show, and in various specials, came
from the Oneida Reservation in north-
ern Wisconsin. On Saturday nights his
family would go to the Oneida Mis-
sion to take showers and then come
home and watch Jackie Gleason. In a
radio interview, Hill said, “That’s when
it kind of set in.... I loved watching
Jackie Gleason.” When his mother
watched Jack Paar, past his bedtime,
he would look on from behind a door
and wonder, “How do I learn how to do
that? How do I get in that box?”
Eventually, he did. The title We Had
a Little Real Estate Problem refers to
Hill’s signature joke, which he told in
his first appearance, in 1978, on The
To night Show (by then hosted by Car-
son): “My people are from Wisconsin.
We used to be from New York. We had
a little real estate problem.” It’s both a
joke and a fact. The Oneida were one of
the tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy,
in what’s now upstate New York. They
fought on the side of the colonists in the
Revolutionary War, but many Oneida
were pushed off their land anyway.
They moved west and reestablished
themselves near Green Bay. There are
now Oneida reservations in both New
York and Wisconsin. The line about
real estate compresses centuries of
history and injustice into seven laconic
and eloquent words. Like “Take my
wife—please,” it goes for maximum
density. Hill compressed the sentiment
further in a “Henny Youngblood”
homage, “Take my land—please!”
All of Hill’s routines derived from his
being Indian, and his subjects ranged
from the origin of the name “Indian”
(“Sure glad [Columbus] wasn’t looking
for Turkey”) to the Pilgrims (“Pilgrims
came to this land four hundred years
ago as illegal aliens. We used to call
them whitebacks”) to the Battle of the
Little Bighorn (a complicated, rather
broad joke involving General Custer,
a cow with a halo over its head, and
the punch line “Holy cow—look at all
those motherfucking Indians!”)
On his way up, Hill played some
tough gigs. He once did his act in San
Francisco at the People’s Temple, run
by the cult leader Jim Jones (“Jim
Jones thought I was funny”). Other
venues—powwows, Native rec centers,
land- rights rallies where he opened for
the singer Buffy Sainte- Marie—were
more far- flung. Native American co-
medians sometimes perform a long way
from anywhere, in places where even
microphones and chairs are not a given,
or where somebody’s back porch is the
stage and the microphone is a bullhorn.
Vincent Craig, a Navajo comedian,
sometimes performed on the back of
a flatbed truck in open fields. The La-
dies of Native Comedy, a three- woman
troupe, have worked on bare ground in
the middle of the desert while trying to
stay in the headlights of a car. Many in-
door venues—such as a motel in Elko,
Nevada, or a steakhouse near Mount
Rushmore, or the Fiesta Room in the
basement of the Phil- Town Truck Stop
in Sturgis, South Dakota—sound not
much more promising.
Remoteness, a difficult fact in the
lives of many Native people, makes it
hard for the comedians among them
to get performing time. Nesteroff fol-
lows Jonny Roberts, an Ojibwe social
worker raising a big family on a res-
ervation in northern Minnesota, who
drives five hours to the Twin Cities to
do seven minutes of stand- up and then
drives five hours back, arriving in time
to help his wife get the kids to school in
the morning before he goes to his day
job. When at the end of the book he
quits the job so he can devote himself
to comedy full- time, you wonder how
that will work out. As one might guess,
beginner stand- ups usually make no
money.Nesteroff’s previous book, The Co-
medians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels
and the History of American Comedy,
provides a wild ride through that larger
subject. Not a single Native American
comedian or humorist appears in it:
there’s no mention of Hill, and in the
part about vaudeville Rogers does not
turn up, either. Within comedy, there
are worlds that don’t overlap. Nesteroff,
who grew up in western Canada, had
been used to seeing Native issues in the
news all the time, and Native stand- up
comedians on TV. When he moved to
Hollywood ten years ago, he was sur-
prised at how few Native performers he
saw in the entertainment business. He
knew that plenty of Native people were
doing stand- up, and he wrote We Had
a Little Real Estate Problem to remedy
the omission.
Mainstream comedy has always been
mostly white, and tilted Jewish, with a
smaller but highly influential number
of Black comedians (Red Foxx, Cosby,
Pryor). Within those categories there
have been non- mainstream subsets,
such as Black performers who workedHEADED INTO
THE ABYSS
THE STORY OF OUR TIME,
AND THE FUTURE
WE’LL FACEBrian T. Watson
Brian T. Watson is an architect
and cultural critic. For eighteen
years, he was a columnist with the
Salem News in Salem, Massachusetts,
focused primarily on current affairs
and the forces that were and are
shaping societies both here and abroad.[email protected]
(781) 367-2008Paper, $13.00
e-Book, $9.99Available on AmazonIndependent of the pandemic, we are beset by
a range of unprecedented developments that
together, in this century, threaten the very
existence of civilization. The current states
of just ten forces — capitalism, technology,
the internet, politics, media, education,
human nature, the environment, population,
and transportation — are driving society in
predominantly negative ways.These forces are powerful and interconnected
and their combined dynamics will carry us
into any number of disasters well before 2100.
We have the knowledge and solutions to address
our difficulties, but for many reasons we will
not employ them.There is urgency to this story. We face many
threats, but one of them — the internet and
its hegemony and imperatives — is rapidly
changing nearly everything about our world,
including our very capacity to recognize how
profound and dangerous the changes are.Headed Into the Abyss is comprehensive. It
presents a satisfyingly round story of our
time. It crosses disciplines, connects dots, and
analyzes how each force — in synergies with
other forces — is shaping society. Individually,
we tend to see and address things in parts,
but the forces shaping our lives exist now in
ecologies that defy piecemeal solutions.Uniquely, Watson brings human nature and
trauma into his assessment of the future. People
have limitations, and these are playing a large
role even now.What it all adds up to — the big picture — is a
sobering conclusion.MLA 2022
During the Modern Language Association’s Annual Convention
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