42 The New York Review‘Part of Why We Survived’
Ian FrazierWe Had a Little Real Estate Problem:
The Unheralded Story of
Native Americans in Comedy
by Kliph Nesteroff.
Simon and Schuster, 318 pp.,
$27.00; $18.99 (paper; to be
published in February)The Comedians:
Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels
and the History of American Comedy
by Kliph Nesteroff.
Grove, 425 pp., $28.00; $18.00 (paper)When Barack Obama was campaign-
ing for Joe Biden in 2020, he spoke at
an event in a gymnasium in Michigan.
As he was leaving, someone bounce-
passed a basketball to him. From deep
in the corner, he tossed up a shot, and
it went in. People yelled, “Whoa- whoa-
whoa- whoa- whoa!” and “All net!”
What former president—what national
political figure of any kind—had ever
hit a walk- off three- pointer, and with
the cameras watching? Amazing! Un-
heard of! Millions later saw the video
online. In a karmic sense, the Demo-
crats won the election right there.
I propose this important moment as
an analogy to stand- up comedy. Mak-
ing an audience laugh hard, without
coercion or restraint—it’s a walk- off
three- point moment, an epiphany of
accuracy, coolness, and style. The pure
high of it must be one of the greatest
feelings in the world.
Kliph Nesteroff, a longtime student
of comedy, has written two books about
this fateful thrill and occupation. The
more recent one, We Had a Little Real
Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story
of Native Americans in Comedy, turns
to a subject that even some who work
in comedy might know nothing about.
Today about a hundred young men
and women from many North Amer-
ican tribes are writing TV and sketch
comedy and performing stand- up and
improv, remuneratively or not. The Na-
vajo comedian Ernie Tsosie says, “Now
almost every tribe has a comedian.”
One question might be: Is there
something in particular about coming
from a Native background that makes a
person want to write and perform com-
edy? Nesteroff mentions the Native
tradition of the sacred clown, called
heyoka by the Lakota, Nanabozho by
the Ojibwe, and Wesakaychak by the
Cree. The clowns, sometimes known
as “contraries,” did things backward
in everyday life and showed the comi-
cal side of their societies. As Adrianne
Chalepah, a Kiowa Apache comedian,
explains:It can feel sometimes like our com-
munities are in a constant state of
mourning, like there aren’t enough
tears to cry about every single trag-
edy. Being able to laugh is import-
ant. Native humor is part of why
we survived. It’s allowing yourself
to feel a little bit of joy in a moment
that might otherwise break you.Doing stand- up comedy takes nerve,
whatever one’s culture or background
(public speaking is one of the most
common fears), and stories of individ-
ual bravery and hero tales have always
been part of tribal cultures. Long be-fore Sitting Bull became a featured
member of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
show, he was famous for his many brave
deeds. In a skirmish with the army es-
cort of a party of railroad surveyors
in the Yellowstone valley, Sitting Bull
sat down within range of the soldiers’
rifles and smoked a pipe while bullets
flew. A few fellow warriors joined him
and passed the pipe. When it was done,
the others got up and ran. Sitting Bull
walked. Stand- up comedy seems like
a modern- day version of that—maybe
one reason Native people admire it.In We Had a Little Real Estate Prob-
lem, Nesteroff goes back to Native
performers from the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Some
of them ended up in Wild West shows
through an agreement between the
government and impresarios like Buf-
falo Bill; sometimes the choice was to
join the company or go to jail. The Of-
fice of Indian Affairs placed others in
medicine shows, where they provided
a backdrop for peddlers of fake Na-
tive cures and sometimes did ethnic-
comedy sales pitches. The first Native
satirist in print was a Muscogee Creek
named Alexander Posey, who used
the pseudonym Fus Fixico. He wrote
a column in Indian dialect for a tribal
newspaper in which he made fun of
the doings of the federal bureaucracy
(a subject Native people know more
about, usually, than do non- Natives,
because of the tribes’ unique, nation-to- nation relationship with the fed-
eral government). For example, Posey
mocked the forced anglicization of
Native names, saying that a “name like
Sitting Bull or Tecumseh was too hard
to remember and don’t sound civilized
like General Cussed Her.” Between
1902 and 1906 he wrote seventy- two
humorous columns as Fixico for the
Eufaula Indian Journal, in what’s now
Oklahoma. These caught the attention
of a promoter, who arranged for him to
join a national lecture tour. Before he
could, however, Posey/Fixico drowned
while crossing a flooded river near his
house, and so he did not get a chance to
be the first Native American stand- up
comedian.
That honor goes indisputably to
Will Rogers, a Cherokee whose image
now adorns postage stamps, a huge
mural overlooking downtown San Ber-
nardino, California, and the airport
in Oklahoma City, which is named for
him; he has joined Mark Twain in the
sparsely populated pantheon of be-
loved old- time humorists. Nesteroff
fills in some details of the Rogers fam-
ily’s history. Before the Cherokee were
driven out of Georgia and North Caro-
lina along the Trail of Tears to Indian
Territory, Rogers’s grandfather, Rob-
ert, was among the minority of tribal
members who took a buyout from the
government. This angered the majority
who resisted. Like some other Native
people in the South, Robert Rogers
owned Black slaves. He established a
ranch in the Cherokee Nation, in thenortheastern corner of what’s now
Oklahoma, and prospered. In 1842 he
was murdered by Cherokee vigilantes.
His son, Clem, Will Rogers’s father,
inherited the ranch and the enslaved
people, whom he freed provisionally
during the Civil War, though he fought
for the South.
Will, born in 1879, could do miracles
with a lariat, like someone hitting three-
point shots on every try. As a rodeo
cowboy, he could catch all four feet of
a running horse with four ropes simul-
taneously and bring it to a stop. When
he moved from rodeo to vaudeville,
Rogers became a lariat- twirling star.
For a while his horse accompanied him
on stage. Then he began interspersing
his act with jokes and dispensed with
the sidekick. As a humorist and a wry,
smarter- than- he- looks cowboy type,
Rogers appeared on radio and in mov-
ies, and wrote a syndicated newspaper
column five days a week that drew 40
million readers. Today no commenta-
tor has the level of national reach that
Will Rogers had, but even in the best
periods of his career, he fell into deep
depressions. He never forgot the evil
that had been done to the Cherokee
or forgave President Andrew Jackson
for setting in motion the Trail of Tears;
Rogers sometimes expounded on those
subjects, to the discomfiture of white
observers.
I knew about Rogers’s wit (“I am not
a member of any organized political
party—I am a Democrat”; “Common
sense ain’t common”; “Never miss a
good chance to shut up”), and of course
I remember that he never met a man he
didn’t like; but I had not given much
thought to his family’s slave- owning
past, or how it might have influenced
him. Nesteroff’s description of Rogers’s
final two years was news to me. On his
radio show in 1934, while introducing
“The Last Round- Up,” a traditional
cowboy song, Rogers described its mel-
ody as “really a nigger spiritual.” He
repeated the word three times during
the broadcast. The Pittsburg Courier,
a leading Black newspaper, called it
an “unwarranted and vicious insult
to 12,000,000 Negroes” that “also
shocked countless thousands of white
radio listeners.” Blacks boycotted his
sponsor (Gulf Oil) and his movies.
Rogers responded with non- apologies
that made things worse. He didn’t see
why the word offended anybody. He
said millions of white southerners used
the word all the time and were the tru-
est friends the race had.
Nesteroff suggests that a connec-
tion existed between this controversy
and Rogers’s subsequent escape into
flying, his favorite pastime. In August
1935, while on a pleasure jaunt with
Wiley Post, the famous one- eyed avi-
ator known for his carelessness, Rog-
ers died in a crash near the Alaskan
Native village of Barrow. His abrupt
and sad end wiped out any memory of
the still- recent outrage he had caused.
Will Rogers’s death became the biggest
news story of the year, and as Nester-
off says, “The complex and nuanced
Cherokee comedian was reduced to a
simple, homespun cowboy, represent-
ing God and country.... A myth was
created that has endured for nearly a
century.”Charlie Hill performing on The Tonight Show, June 1991Gary Null/NBCUPhoto Bank/NBCUniversal /Getty ImagesFrazierWhitlock 42 _ 48 .indd 42 12 / 15 / 21 7 : 06 PM