Read This: Me Funny
Non-fiction edited by Drew Hayden Taylor (Douglas & McIntyre)
REVIEW BY Adrienne Weiss
Inherent to the art of comedy is that it is difficult to pigeonhole. And that’s just what Me Funny, a new anthology of Native humour writing, edited by award-winning playwright, author and filmmaker Drew Hayden Taylor, doesn’t want to do.
Me Funny is varied in scope and tone, yet its authors maintain a common thematic thread: That although Native humour has been a survival tool in the face of oppression, it has also been a natural part of storytelling tradition. In other words, the funny has always been there.
The collection shifts from scholarly essays to facetious “ethno-based examples of cultural jocularity and racial comicalness,” to straight narratives. On the scholarly side, Allan J. Ryan’s “One Big Indian” stands out as a deconstruction of how humour, in Native art, informs and asserts truths and stereotypes of the Indian as image, from Indian and non-Indian perspectives. Though interesting, it, and others like it, would be better served in their own anthology. The best pieces, like Don Kelly’s step-by-step analysis of his own stand-up routine, Thomas King’s “The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour” and Tomson Highway’s take on why Cree is the funniest language, get the joke ball rolling. These pieces do what the scholarly essays can’t: make the reader laugh out loud. Me Funny begs for more examples of Native humour at work rather than at the dissection table.
Though uneven in tone, there is much in Me Funny to value, enjoy and, of course, laugh at.
