INDIAN HUMOR

See also PowerPoints on “Alexie’s

Humorous Names,” and “Ethnic Humor”

by Don L. F. Nilsen
and Alleen Pace Nilsen
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Kachina Dancers

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 APACHE HUMOR
• Apaches are fond of mocking white speech
with high-pitched English exclamations like
“I don’t like it, my friend. You don’t look
good to me. Maybe you’re sick, need to eat
some aspirins!.”

• Such language contains much verbal play,

code-switching, stock phrases, specific
lexical items, recurrent sentence types, and
modifications in pitch, volume, tempo, and
voice quality (Lowe 198).
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 ARAPAHO CONTRARIES

• Arapaho contraries groan

loudly when they lift light
objects and pretend not to
notice when lifting truly
heavy objects.

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 CLOWNS
• John Lowe writes about ritual clowns.

• “Dressed outrageously, frequently in rags and

masks, they would mimic the serious kachina
dancers, stumbling, falling, throwing or even
eating filth or excrement, setting up rival fake-
Gods and “worshipping” them in an exaggerated
fashion, only to beat them a few seconds later.”

• “Much of their humor was sexual, and some of

them were permitted to grab spectators’ genitals”
(Lowe 193-194).

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 CONTRARIES
• Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man is based on Flaming
Rainbow’s autobiographical Black Elk Speaks.
Flaming Rainbow’s other name is John G. Neihardt.

• In Little Big Man, a contrary clown arrives riding

backwards on a horse with his body painted in
motley colors. He says “Goodbye” for “Hello,” “I’m
glad I did it!” for “I’m sorry.” He cleans himself with
sand, and then exits by walking through the river.

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• In the summer, a contrary
might pretend to feel cold
and dress in buffalo robes.
In the winter he pretends
to be warm as he stands
naked in the snow.

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 CORRECTIVE HUMOR
• In the tribal community, humor is used to
help people correct innapropriate behavior.

• Indians often refer to their Indian brothers

and sisters as being “apples.”

• This is extending a long parade of ethnic

capitulations with Whites by referring to
blacks as Oreos, Asians as Bananas and
Hispanics as Coconuts (Katz 77).
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• Sterotypical Indian art for
tourist shops is sarcastically
referred to as the “Bambi
School,” because it creates
a “proliferation of deer
prancing over purple
mountains” (Katz 75).

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 COWBOYS AND INDIANS

• “Indians make the best cowboys”

(Alexie 18).

• Victor’s father tells Victor, “I remember

the first time your mother and I danced.
We were in this cowboy bar. We were
the only real cowboys there despite the
fact that we’re indians” (Alexie 29).
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• “Forget about the
cowboys versus Indians
business. The most
intense competition on
any reservation is Indians
versus Indians” (Alexie
188).
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 COYOTE
• Coyote, who is the creator of all the
Indians, was sitting on a cloud. He was
bored, so he started clipping his toenails.
He looked around for somewhere to
throw the toenail clippings, and couldn’t
find any place.

• So he got really mad and dropped his

clippings over the side of the cloud and
they fell to earth (Alexie 135).
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• “The clippings burrowed into
the ground like seeds and grew
up to be the white man.”

• “Coyote, he looked down at his

newest creation and said, ‘Oh
shit’” (Alexie 135).

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• Talking about Coyote stories,
Yellowman said that they “are not funny
stories.” The people laugh at the way
Coyote does things, and at the way the
story is told, but “the story is not
funny.”

• The stories are told because, “If my

children don’t hear the stories, they will
grow up to be bad” (Toelken and Scott
80).
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• Coyote can be found in the poetry and
prose of many contemporary writers.

• For example, Coyote allows Peter Blue

Cloud to make fun of current events:
“People are still doing the same stupid
and good things that they were doing
hundreds of years ago, so why not tell
the same stories and just bring them up
to today?” (Bruchac 31).

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 CREEK & MUSKOGEE HUMOR
• Alexander Posey created a fictional ethnic
“reporter” named Fus Fixico (which means
“fearless bird”) to comment on the wrongs
done to the Creek people by the U.S.
Government.

• Posey sometimes used the pen name

“Chinnubbie Harjo,” who in Muskogee
mythology was a trickster who could change
his character (Lowe 198-199).
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 DAKOTA CLOWNS

• In Dakota cultures,
clowning and
exaggerating are deemed
to be therapeutic.

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 “ENIT”
• Throughout Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in
Heaven, and the movie version, Smoke Signals, a very common Indian
expression is “enit.”

• “Want to get something to eat?”

• “Yeah.”

• “How about a hamburger at Dick’s?”

• “Sounds good, enit?” (Alexie 217).

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 HOPI HUMOR
• In Hopi, the word for “clowning” is the
same word as that used for “making a
point” (Nilsen and Nilsen 27).

• Hopi verbal humor relies heavily on

puns, many of them sexual (Malotki
205).

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 JOKES
• In her I Tell You Now, Paula Gunn Allen
talked about what she called, “an odd
brand of English…a punning, cunning
language that is mostly local, mostly
half-breed spoken by the people
around me, filled with elegance and
vulgarity side by side, small jokes that
are language jokes and family jokes
and area jokes.”

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 KOSHARI CONTRARIES

• Koshari contraries talk

backwards and know how
to babble total nonsense.

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 MAYAN CONTRARIES
• Mayan contraries pretend to
be afraid of inconsequential
events and fall to the ground
when confronted by small
obstacles.

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 NAVAJO HUMOR
• In the Navajo culture, the first time an
infant laughs, the family holds a
celebration in which the child
symbolically provides bread and salt to
the family members and guests,
signifying that he or she is now a part
of the tribe.

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 OPPRESSED PEOPLES
• Indians, like Jews, blacks, and other oppressed
peoples, learn the rules and then invert them.

• Custer was well dressed at the Little Big Horn.

When the Sioux found his body, he had on an
Arrow shirt.

• He had boasted that he could ride through the

entire Sioux nation. He was half right. He
made it half-way through (Deloria 149).

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 PAN INDIAN HUMOR
• When Bill Moyers asked Louise Erdrich
about the humor in her poems, in her short
stories and in her Love Medicine, The Beet
Queen, and Tracks, Erdrich said that creating
and enjoying ironic survival humor, often at
the expense of the white oppressors, might
be one of the few universal characteristics
shared by all U.S. Indian tribes.

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• Vine Deloria observed that when the missionaries
first came to America, they had all of the Bibles, and
the Indians had all the land.

• Now, the missionaries have all the land, and all the
Indians have is the Bible (Nilsen and Nilsen 27).

• Deloria says that in Indian affairs very little is

accomplished without humor. “Humor is used not
only for entertainment but also for education and for
spurring people to action.”

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• In 1988, Vine Deloria
named his book Custer
Died for Your Sins after a
bumper sticker on the
Sioux reservation which
was designed to tease
missionaries.
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• Kenneth Lincoln explains that “not
only do Indians bold and revitalize,
scapegoat and survive through
laughter, but they draw on millenia-
old traditions of Trickster gods and
holy fools, comic romances and
epic boasts.”

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 PARODY
• In Sherman Alexie’s Smoke Signals
there is a T-shirt advertising “Fry Bread
Power,” and when Victor’s mother
magically feeds a crowd that is twice as
big as she had expected by raising her
arms heavenward and solemnly ripping
each piece of fry bread in half, this is
known as “The Miracle of the Fry
Bread.”

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• The KREZ radio station has a traffic reporter
who reports on the two or three cars he sees
from the top of his broken-down Volkswagen
van. The enthusiastic announcer on KREZ
shouts out, “It’s a great day to be
indigenous!”

• Meanwhile, back at home, Victor tells Thomas

to shut off the TV, saying, “There’s only one
thing more pathetic than Indians on TV and
that’s Indians watching Indians on TV.”

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 PUEBLO CLOWNS
• Clowns in Pueblo communities dress in
rags and masks and mock the serious
Kachina dancers by stumbling, falling
down, throwing and sometimes miming
the eating of excrement.

• They also pretend to worship fake gods

in an exaggerated manner.

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 THE RESERVATION
• “There’s an old Indian poet who said
that Indians can reside in the city, but
they can never live there” (Alexie 187).

• Victor’s father in The Lone Ranger was

wearing old jeans and a red T-shirt.
“He looked as Indian as you can get”
(Alexie 219).
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• “I could spend my whole life on the
reservation and never once would I see
a friend of mine and think how Indian
he looked. But as soon as I get off the
reservation, among all the white
people, every Indian gets exaggerated.”

• “My father’s braids looked three miles

long and black and shiny as a police-
issue revolver” (Alexie 219).

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 RESERVATION QUIET

• Victor’s father left his mother. At night he

would imagine his father’s motorcycle
pulling up outside. He would rush around
the house, pull on his shoes, socks, and coat
and run outside to find an empty driveway.
“It was so quiet, a reservation kind of quiet,
where you can hear somebody drinking
whiskey on the rocks three miles away”
(Alexie 35).

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 RESERVATION REALISM

• Alexie says that the stories he tells are not

really true. They are the vision of one person
looking at the lives of his family, and his
entire tribe, so they are “biased, incomplete,
exaggerated, deluded, and often just plain
wrong.” He calls his stories “reservation
realism” (Alexie xxi).

• Alexie says that every indian in his book is

dark skinned with long black hair. “It’s the
Stepford Tribe of Indians” (Alexie xxii).
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• “On a reservation, Indian men
who abandon their children are
treated worse than white
fathers who do the same thing.
It’s because white men have
been doing that forever and
Indian men have just learned
how. That’s how assimilation
can work” (Alexie 34).
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 RESERVATION TRAFFIC

• Adrian asked, “When did that…traffic signal

quit working?”
• “Don’t know.”
• “…They better fix it. Might cause an
accident.”

• They both looked at each other, then looked

at the traffic signal, and knew that only about
one car passed by every hour (Alexie 48).
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 SKELETONS

• “Your past is a skeleton walking one

step behind you, and your future is a
skeleton walking one step in front of
you” (Alexie 21).

• “What you have to do is keep moving,

keep walking, in step with your
skeletons” (Alexie 21).
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• “Sometimes your skeletons will dress up as
beautiful Indian women and ask you to slow
dance. Sometimes your skeletons will dress
up as your best friend and offer you a drink”
(Alexie 22).

• “But no matter what they do, keep walking,

keep moving. And don’t wear a watch. Hell,
Indians never need to wear a watch because
your skeletons will always remind you about
the time. That’s what Indian time is. The past,
the future, all of it is wrapped up in the now”
(Alexie 22).
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 A SOBER INDIAN
• “A sober Indian has infinite patience with a drunk
Indian. There ain’t many who do stay sober. Most
spend time in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and
everybody gets to know the routines.”

• “Hi, my name is Junior.”

• “Hi, Junior,” everybody shouts in ironic unison.

• “Hi, my name is Lester FallsApart, and I’ve been

drunk for twenty-seven straight years” (Alexie 204).

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• Victor’s father in Alexie’s novel says,
“even though the wreck was mostly my
fault, he got the blame. I was sober and
the cops couldn’t believe it. They never
heard of a sober Indian getting in a car
wreck.”

• “Like Ripley’s Believe It or Not?”

• “Something like that” (Alexie 218).

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 THE STOIC INDIAN
• Washington Irving, after a trip to the prairies in 1832,
said that Indians are “by no means the stoics that
they are represented…. When the Indians are
among themselves…there cannot be greater
gossips…. They are great mimics and buffoons
also, and entertain themselves excessively at the
expense of the whites…reserving all comments until
they are alone. Thus it is that they give full scope to
criticism, satire, mimicry, and mirth” (Basso x).

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 TOHONO O’ODHAM CLOWNS

• The Tohono O’Odham Indians

are also known as the Papago
Indians. Tohono O’Odham
clowns use squeaks and signs
to beg food from the audience.

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 TRICKSTERS
• Karl Kroeber says that Trickster stories
allow us to “have fantasy indulgence in
taboo behavior, release psychic
tension, and simultaneously present a
cautionary tale; but more important is
the storytelling itself, which the
audience participates in” (Kroeber 82).

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• In Leslie Marmon Silko’s
Storyteller, Coyote rides a bus
to the Hopi Second Mesa.

• Northwest Indians often show

Trickster as a Raven with the
ability to shoot arrows and
carve out canoes.

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• Eastern tribes favored Rabbit as
a Trickster, while Southwestern
and Plains tribes favored the
Coyote.

• The Deer, the Hare, the Spider,

the Jay, the Wolverine, and the
“Old Man” Nanaboyho also play
the Trickster role (Lowe 194).
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• Andrew Wiget outlines the qualities of the
Indian trickster as follows:

• They exhibit independence from temporal and

spatial boundaries.

• They are creative, destructive, and amusing,

often in scatalogical ways.

• They are heroes, but they are also villains.

• They are abnormal both mentally and

physically.

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• They have enlarged sexual qualities and
enormous libidos.

• They represent extremes (young-old, good-

evil, life-death).

• They appear either as humans with animal

qualities, or as animals with human qualities.

• They have an endearing relationship with

their mothers or grandmothers.

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 Most Indian languages are agglutinating so that a complete
sentence is found in a single word—for example:

Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagu
ngamaugg!

NAME OF A LAKE IN MASACHUSSETTS

TRANSLATION: “I fish on my side; you fish

on your side; nobody fish in the middle!”

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