44 The New York Review
mostly at Black nightclubs (the chitlin’
circuit), borscht belt comedians who
never left the Catskills, and truck- stop
comedians who concentrated on the
white blue- collar audience. From the
grassroots level a few rose to wider
fame; Foxx began as a chitlin’ circuit
comedian. Native comedians have their
own non- mainstream world, which
made Hill’s successes on national TV
all the more remarkable and inspiring
to them.
A strain that runs between both
books is the diciness of comedy as
a way to make a living, or even as a
way to live. Some of the most success-
ful comedians go through unusually
drastic career swerves. One might
have thought, from watching Shecky
Greene’s talk show appearances years
ago, that he was a semi- funny hack- ish
comedian more admired
by the hosts, who seemed
to be friends of his, than
by the audience. In The
Comedians Greene ca-
reens through the story as
a comic genius–madman,
climbing the curtains in
Las Vegas nightclubs and
driving his Cadillac into
the fountain of the Caesars
Palace Hotel. Frank Sina-
tra has him beaten up (but
for something else). Then
there’s Rodney Danger-
field failing at comedy,
going broke, becoming
a scam aluminum- siding
salesman, getting arrested,
receiving the lucky break
of no jail time, returning
to comedy with the line “I
don’t get no respect,” and
making his fortune.
There’s also the slow-
motion train wreck of
Lenny Bruce as he de-
scends toward heroin ad-
diction and poverty while
performing some of the
most avant comedy ever,
admitting, for example,
not only that the Jews killed Christ,
but that “we did it—my family. I found
a note in the basement. It said, ‘We
killed Him. Signed, Morty.’” (The joke
as I remember it; it’s not mentioned
by Nesteroff.) There’s the Greek-
dialect comedian Parkyakarkus, also
known as Harry Einstein, delivering
a hilarious monologue at the Friars
Club, sitting down to a roar of ap-
plause, and dropping dead of a heart
attack. But there’s also the calming
presence of his sons, Bob Einstein
and Albert Brooks, whose own ca-
reers in comedy seem to have been less
fraught.
Nesteroff considers the special dif-
ficulties faced by comedians whose
subject is politics. When Oswald shot
Kennedy, he also as good as destroyed
Vaughn Meader, the Kennedy imper-
sonator whose first comedy album, The
Fi rst Family, went platinum in 1962.
Meader’s career ended with the assas-
sination the following year. He began
drinking, ran out of money, scrounged
in garbage cans. Mort Sahl, whose act
involved reading and commenting on
that day’s newspaper, lost popularity by
clinging to political riffs when the fash-
ion changed. Bob Hope suffered from
a similar problem, constantly teeing off
on hippies and the counterculture and
boring everybody but his own Palm
Springs demographic.
A figure of importance in both The
Comedians and We Had a Little Real
Estate Problem is Dick Gregory, the
Black comedian who not only found
most of his subject matter in politics
but who joined marches for civil rights
and was beaten and arrested and jailed.
Charlie Hill took inspiration from
Gregory, who was his hero. The two
both came up in the late- Sixties, early-
Seventies protest era, and Gregory
even participated in Native fundraisers
and land rights demonstrations. Pub-
lic awareness of Native issues in those
years would later shrink to a point
where some people remembered only
the American Indian Movement (AIM)
from the takeover of Alcatraz Island,
and maybe a larger number could also
recall Marlon Brando turning down
the Academy Award to protest Holly-wood’s mistreatment of Indians. Hill’s
career as a comedian began in that po-
litical atmosphere. In the first comedy
routine he did on network television,
he said that his dream was to win an
Academy Award and turn it down in
protest of the mistreatment of Marlon
Brando.
Yet Nesteroff doesn’t give some of
the political moments the deeper look
they deserve. He talks about the case
of Leonard Peltier, which is an opaque
business to this day, but he mentions
only in passing the killing of two FBI
agents in 1975 that led to Peltier’s ar-
rest, trial, and conviction. Jack Coler
and Ronald Williams had come to the
Pine Ridge Reservation in South Da-
kota during an investigation of crimes
there, and they were brutally executed
at close range after first being am-
bushed and wounded. And it’s weird
to see the name of Anna Mae Aquash
listed without further identification
among the important women behind
the scenes at AIM. Aquash, a Mi’kmaq
tribal member from Nova Scotia, was
thought by AIM higher- ups to be an
FBI informant, and they may have or-
dered her murder, in 1975; two men
were given life sentences for the crime.
In a book about comedy, it might have
been hard to put that in, but some refer-
ence should be there, for her sake and
for the sake of reality.Hill’s career did not last long enough.
During the 1980s boom in stand- up that
strewed at least 260 comedy clubs across
the country and multiplied opportuni-
ties for comedians on TV, Hill worked
a lot. But in the early 1990s the boom
ended, TV appearances dried up, and he
was broke. He found occasional writing
jobs, such as for the sitcom Roseanne.
Meanwhile Native would- be comedi-
ans were watching his old cassettes and
memorizing his groundbreaking rou-
tines. Today, young Native people still
know and revere his name. A Canadian
Ojibwe, Craig Lauzon, said Hill was
“the first genuinely First Nations person
I ever saw on TV, and he wasn’t pretend-
ing to be anything else.” Working only
seldom and unable to afford his apart-
ment in Venice Beach, Hill went back
to the family home on the reservation inWisconsin with his Navajo wife, Lenora
Hatathlie. There he was diagnosed with
lymphoma, and he died in 2013 at the
age of sixty- two.
In the most recent decade, political
events again brought attention to Na-
tive comedy. The pipeline protest on the
Standing Rock Reservation in North
and South Dakota drew tribal delega-
tions from around the continent; as the
protests grew, attracted more coverage,
and (temporarily) succeeded, Native
comedians and performers found they
were getting more calls and opportu-
nities for work. The 1491s, a comedy
troupe of five Native writer- performers,
had existed before the protest, doing
shows at reservations and small- to-
medium venues. After Standing Rock,
they branched out abundantly. Troupe
member Thomas Ryan RedCorn took a
writing job on Rutherford Falls, a cable
sitcom with a large Native cast, whose
showrunner is Sierra Teller Ornelas, the
sixth- generation Navajo weaver.
Another of the 1491s, Sterlin Harjo,
a Seminole independent filmmaker, co-
created a series for FX called Reserva-
ti on Dogs, based on life in his hometown
in Oklahoma. Everyone who writes for
the show is Native, plus most of the cast.
This multi- episode documentary- style
comedy- drama is brilliant and hilari-
ous—the best modern American West-
ern I’ve seen. Among its many standouts,Dallas Goldtooth, also of the 1491s, por-
trays the ghost of a Lakota warrior who
has returned from the spirit world to
cajole and counsel one of the characters
and offer fractured wisdom; he makes
me laugh to tears. The show’s details of
res life are sharp—the rearview mirror
duct- taped to the windshield, the lariat
lying coiled- up and forgotten on the
floor next to the mops by the restroom
in the town’s convenience store. I don’t
know if the lariat was intended to refer
to Will Rogers, but in that setting how
could it not? The show certainly has an
awareness of history; one of the minor
characters is named Fixico.Your standard B- movie cowboy had
only about four lines: “Yep,” “Nope,”
“Thank you kindly, ma’am,” and “I
wouldn’t do that if I was
you, mister.” Just four
lines, and some dust and
six- shooters, and that’s
your whole story. But if
the standard cowboy had
little to say, the stock
Indian had less. In the
non- Native imagination,
Indians were supposed to
be stoic and silent. Where
this fantasy came from
is a mystery, because in
actual meetings between
whites and Native people
of the Americas, the Na-
tives often said plenty. In
an account of the Span-
ish conquest of Cuba,
Bartolomé de Las Casas
writes of a Franciscan friar
who tried to baptize a Na-
tive by promising him that
baptism would get him
into heaven in the next
life. The Native asked
if he would meet other
people like the friar in
heaven; the friar said yes.
The Native replied that in
that case he preferred not
to go.
When Joseph Brant, the Iroquois
leader who translated the Book of
Mark into Mohawk, met King George
III, he was told that he had to kneel and
kiss the king’s ring. Brant declined but
offered to kiss the hand of the queen in-
stead. Sometimes the indigenous peo-
ple observed even fewer proprieties.
During the Battle of Boston, in 1775,
the Americans’ Mohican allies were
described as standing on the shore and
mooning the British navy.
Impassive, with an austere dignity
of mien—such was supposed to be the
deportment of the Noble Savage. None
of that fit with the image of a person
mooning a warship or laughing his
head off. When the historian Francis
Parkman lived with a tribe of Oglala
Sioux in 1846, their humor flummoxed
him so that he shrank from describing
it. In his book The Oregon Trail, the
greatest warrior of the tribe wins Park-
man’s admiration, with passages refer-
ring to “his statue- like form, limbed
like an Apollo of bronze,” his “singu-
larly deep and strong” voice, and so on.
Then suddenly something strikes the
bronze Apollo as funny, and Parkman
says, “See him as he lies there in the
sun before our tent, kicking his heels
in the air and cracking jokes with his
brother. Does he look like a hero?”
Parkman can barely endure the sight.
After those two sentences, he’s back toMembers of the comedy troupe the 1491s, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 2016. From left: Thomas Ryan RedCorn,
Dallas Goldtooth, Sterlin Harjo, Migizi Pensoneau, and Bobby Wilson.Shane Brown