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KRISZTINA Kopó
There were a lot of adjectives. Lacking among them was funny. Savage irony and
morbid humor did sometimes enter the picture as a kind of self-flagellation device
for whites, but on the whole Natives were treated by almost everyone with the
utmost gravity, as if they were either too awe-inspiring as blood-curdling savages
or too sacrosanct in their status of holy victim to allow of any comic reactions either
to them or by them. Furthermore, nobody ever seems to have asked them what if
anything they found funny. The Native as presented in non-Native writing was
singularly lacking in a sense of humor; sort of like the “good” woman of Victorian
fiction, who acquired at the hands of male writers the same kind of tragic-eyed,
long-suffering solemnity.”
This insensitivity of the whites toward any understanding of Native humor
began to change and show signs of progress with the social and political
upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s. These changes involved actions
resulting in decolonization and self-determination, which ultimately led to
Native writers creating literature with humor as its basic feature. This sparked
the development of quite a few Native theater groups throughout North
America."' The new literary works written by Native playwrights, however,
seem to have caught the non-Natives by surprise, causing bewilderment and
incredulity. As Margaret Atwood comments:
Things are changing. Natives are now writing fiction, poetry and plays, and
some of the literature being produced by them is both vulgar and hilarious.
A good many stereotypes are hitting the dust, a few sensibilities are in the
process of being outraged. The comfortable thing about a people who do not
have a literary voice, or at least not one you can hear or understand, is that
you never have to listen to what they are saying about you.”
The “you” that Atwood refers to is the non-Native white Caucasian. For
a white European scholar/critic studying Native humor, the realization that
this theme is loaded with pitfalls of all kinds is rather unnerving. Why? Native
humor is unlike American, Canadian, English, Irish or even Hungarian
humor. In trying to understand Native humor one should comprehend its
essence, and its roots. Like any form of humor, it can heal and release stress,
and depression. According to Cynthia Lindquist Mala, “being able to laugh
is a way to cope that promotes healing and unity. Indian humor is rooted
in life lessons. It means laughing at the myriad of tests thrown at us since
10 Margaret Atwood, A Double-Bladed Knife, Subversive Laughter in Two Stories by Thomas
King, in W. H. New (ed.), Native Writers and Canadian Writing, Vancouver, UBC, 1992,
243-244.
1! Diane Debenharn, Native People in Contemporary Canadian Drama, Canadian Drama, 14¬
2, 1988, 137.
2 Atwood, A Double-Bladed Knife, 244.
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