>>FEATURE
ME FUNNY
Compiled and edited by Drew Hayden Taylor
Douglas & McIntyre, 191 pp.
Drew Hayden Taylor is Ojibwa on his mother’s side and grew up on a reserve, but people regularly think he’s a Caucasian due to his blue eyes and light skin. So Hayden Taylor, a playwright, author and columnist, has come up with a shtick he often uses.
My standard line is, ‘I’m half Ojibwa, half white – that makes me an Occasion,’" he jokes.
Despite sometimes being mistaken as a white man, Hayden Taylor grew up thoroughly immersed in his aboriginal culture and says he never knew his white father. He’s become a leading authority on aboriginal humour, both through his use of it in his plays, books and columns and also by researching and analyzing it for a recent National Film Board documentary, Redskins, Tricksters and Puppy Stew, and now in a new book called Me Funny.
The book, which Hayden Taylor edited and compiled, is a collection of essays written by experts on aboriginal humour, including writers Tomson Highway and Thomas King and standup comedian Don Kelly.
Hayden Taylor says that, growing up on the reserve, he was always surrounded by lighthearted jesting and he considers his uncles some of the funniest people he’s ever met.
"We lived right across the road from my grandparents when my grandparents were alive, and there’s this big old willow tree with these big wooden chairs out front, and during the summer there’s always someone sitting around the bonfire telling jokes and you can just hear the laughter rolling across the field," he says.
Despite their subject, some of the essays in Me Funny are a little dry and academic, but there are others that are much more interesting and engaging – such as Highway’s essay on Cree as the "funniest language in the world." The playwright and novelist declares that Cree isn’t a language of the mind or the senses, but instead "Cree lives in the groin, in the sex organs."
"It lives, that is to say, in the most fun-loving, the most pleasurable – not to mention the funniest looking – part of the human corpus," he writes.
Thomson claims that if you speak Cree you are always laughing "so hard your sides would hurt."
Kelly’s chapter is hilarious, but also very thought-provoking as he describes how he uses humour to delve into race relations and racism in Canada.
"It’s been said that simply being born native in Canada is a political act," he writes. "You’re a walking shadow of the unfinished business that hangs over the country, an uncomfortable reminder of the reality that gives lie to Canada’s cherished self-image as a fair and just country. You’re Canada’s living, breathing, dirty little secret. In other words, a prime topic for feel-good comedy! The jokes just write themselves."
Various examples of aboriginal humour are scattered throughout the book. Hayden Taylor says one of the funniest is a joke that appears at the end, which is anything but politically correct: "These two Indians walk out of a bar – hey, it could happen."
"That’s short and sweet and just hilarious," he says.
Hayden Taylor believes aboriginal humour is "a form of survival humour."
"It’s the product of 400 to 500 years of colonization, oppression. It’s been filtered through the residential school experience, the adoption scoop-up experience, the life on the reserve experience, fourth-world existence experience, so when it comes out that way, it is a bit more tart. It is barbed. It can inflict pain," he says.
But it can also be a very positive force. Hayden Taylor likes to use a quote he got from an elder on the Blood reserve in Alberta, who said, "humour is the WD40 of healing."
Hayden Taylor says he put together the book for both aboriginal and non-aboriginal readers to enjoy. "For those not necessarily well-acquainted with the aboriginal sense of humour and the aboriginal culture, this is a wonderful primer for understanding what tickles us, what motivates our funny bone and how much we like to have a good time. And for native people, it’s an opportunity to celebrate their aboriginal sense of humour." |
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