Playwright Drew Hayden Taylor in Curve Lake, Ont., in August, 2025.J0HAN HALLBERG-CAMPBELL/The Globe and Mail
A few weeks ago, a play of mine was produced in Vancouver at the Firehall Arts Centre. It’s a play that uses the criminal practice of forging Norval Morrisseau paintings as a springboard to examine the larger issues of authenticity in the First Nations community. As usual, it explores those issues with large dollops of humour.
But a theatre critic left me pondering a different issue. In her review, Jo Ledingham wrote that a particular speech “got a lot of laughs on opening night as Nazhi struggles to defend herself. The more she protests, the louder the guffaws and snorts of derision from the audience. I wasn’t laughing. … Somehow, I was just missing the funny boat. Was it just that First Nation’s sense of humour?”
It wasn’t the mediocre review that annoyed me – as a playwright for 30 odd years, I’ve gotten my share. In fact, at this same theatre, a production of mine received a bomb threat. (To me that’s a more interesting anecdote to share at a dinner party than getting a Governor-General’s Award. Top that Morris Panych and Judith Thompson!) More than anything, it was her supposition that Indigenous humour was fundamentally different from hers or anybody else’s. Unfathomable for most Canadians. At least, that’s what I garnered from her comment.
The uniqueness of Indigenous humour and the dominant culture’s response to it has always been of interest to me – and has occasionally made me raise an eyebrow. Some time back, my play Dead White Writer On The Floor was produced at Thunder Bay’s Magnus theatre. In a radio review, two settler women expressed a certain amount of puzzlement that the bleachers, where they were sitting, were literally shaking from a whack of Indigenous patrons laughing.
Drew Hayden Taylor: Circular arguments about Indigenous identity are about as annoying as mosquitoes
It’s a well-known fact Indigenous people love their humour. I have been to more than 150 First Nation communities and I have always been greeted with a smile, a joke, a laugh. There’s a three joke minimum at most family gatherings.
Frequently, there are jokes of ours that some folks – lets call them the colour challenged – don’t get and, on occasion, jokes by certain others – let’s call them people of pallor – that we don’t get. I once walked out during the intermission of a Molière comedy in Regina. Perhaps the fact they were doing a Molière comedy in Regina may be a joke in itself but, regardless, I felt nary a chuckle forcing its way to the surface.
When I was about four, my grandparents got one of the first televisions on the reserve. Somehow, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating this, I remember being put in front of the newfangled machine as they turned it on. I’m pretty sure, though I wouldn’t testify to it in court, that my first exposure to Caucasian humour was the Three Stooges. To this day, every time I see a shovel I fear somebody is going to hit me with it, leaving an impression of my face in the metal. I still don’t get why that’s funny.
Eons ago I co-directed a documentary for the National Film Board of Canada on Indigenous humour called Redskins, Tricksters and Puppy Stew. A decade or so after, I compiled and edited a book exploring and deconstructing Indigenous humour titled Me Funny. Some time in the near future I plan to write/direct another documentary exploring how colonization has affected contemporary Indigenous humour here and around the world. The working title is Comedy of the Colonized.
My point is that I’ve spent my career making Indigenous people – and hopefully many pigment-denied people – laugh. Or I’ve tried to.
Anishinaabe theatre artist Yolanda Bonnell knows of what I speak. Dealing with critics and some patrons – let’s call them the melanin lacking – can be a minefield. In early 2020, Bonnell make a public request that her plays be reviewed only by racialized theatre critics. Bonnell told the Guardian that critics “come at Indigenous art with a different lens – that often comes back to ‘If I don’t understand it, that means it’s not good or it’s not a valid form of theatre.’ ”
While not specifically a comment about humour, Bonnell’s point is still valid, though I’m not that radical. If the reviewer doesn’t get the joke, and the other audience members do, be they Indigenous or not, I think that says more about the critic. My mortgage knows no race.
I still try to understand the possible differences between the two cultures and their appreciation of humour. Does the slippery banana peel understand the Indian Act? When Indigenous actors say “wound a knee” rather than “break a leg,” is that a comment on colonization?
Humour is such serious business.