Native American Stand-Up Comedy: Epideictic Strategies in the Contact Zone

Abstract

Contemporary Native American stand-up comedy is a form of epideictic rhetoric in the contact zone of the performance space, using generic conventions of stand-up comedy, traditional elements of Native humor, and Aristotelian strategies to challenge what audiences think they know about indigenous experiences in this land. Specifically, Howie Miller is one Native American stand-up comedian who constructs an epideictic performance in which entertainment, education, and assumptions collide.

Notes

¹Limon's one-sentence summation of his theory is, “What is stood up in stand-up comedy is abjection,” and he pulls heavily from Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection, which he defines as “abasement, groveling prostration” (4). Looking at the comedy of Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Ellen DeGeneres, and many others, Limon writes with a cultural-studies point of view, declaring, “Stand-up itself has the structure of abjection insofar as comedians are not allowed to be either natural or artificial (Are they themselves or acting?)… . All a stand-up's life feels abject to him or her, and stand-ups try to escape it by living it as an act” (6).

²Plenty of people have done this. In fact, in Taylor's book, Me Funny, several Native comedians and humorists define Native or Aboriginal comedy. Don Kelly (Ojibwa) suggests the claim that Native humor is “the comedy of coping––a response to troubled times, dark days, and oppression” is contradictory. Rather, he argues, “Perhaps the last couple of centuries have sharpened and honed our wit, but laughter has echoed across Turtle Island for centuries… . Comedy is well-trod ground, but Native stand-up comedy is wide-open terrain. There are no boundaries and no borders. It's undiscovered country. And our people are experts in navigating new territory” (“And Now, Ladies and Gentlemen” 62–65).

³I thank Rhetoric Review reviewers Oscar Giner and Daniel Schowalter for their valuable suggestions and recommendations that improved this article. My sincere appreciation goes out to them for their time and consideration.

⁴Walker cites Leslie Kurke's 1991 The Traffic in Praise: “Pindar's epinikia negotiated social and political tensions between wealthy aristocrats … and non-aristocrats, at a time when the social power of the traditional warrior-aristocrat was being displaced (though not eliminated)” (24). Clearly, the idea that an artistic form can have this sort of persuasive authority is not new.

⁵One could also put the study of Native American stand-up comedy in the context of more ancient Native American comic forms such as the sacred clowns who heal through laughter. For instance, the heyoka of the Lakota perform satires to teach and reflect certain behaviors of the audience to shape the moral and ethical boundaries of the community. Heyokas act contrary to convention and violate the boundaries of rules, social norms, and taboos in order to provide guidance about what those boundaries, rules, and taboos are. Although it is tempting to either compare modern indigenous comedians with the traditional sacred clowns (or trickster figures), or to suggest that these comedians are consciously breaking with these traditional forms, I am not comfortable with either direction. Rather, I would like to acknowledge that humor and comedy in some form has been and remains ubiquitous with Native American peoples.

⁶In the absence of a traditional critical construct to explain the psychic and emotional processes of comedy, I rely on a term borrowed from tragedy, using catharsis as a correlative, but not as a proven exemplar.

⁷On the first page of Gerald Vizenor's preface to Manifest Manners, he explains survivance: “Survivance is an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name. Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry” (vii). Further along in the first chapter “Postindian Warriors” he writes, “Performance and human silence are strategies of survivance” (16). Indeed, the idea that performance is a survivance strategy is important when considering Native American stand-up comedy.