Booknotes: We Had a Little Real Estate Problem by Kliph Nesteroff
We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans & Comedy
by Kliph Nesteroff
Finished 1/15/22
A delightful and honest counter-history of stand-up comedy that parallels the story of Native American resistance to colonialism in the 20th century.
Nesteroff’s first book “The Comedians” cast a broad and almost encylopedic net over the story of stand-up comedy, whose origins lay in the minstrel shows and vaudeville circuits of the 19th century. But in this book, Nesteroff makes clear that another form of popular performance accompanied these more well-known proto-comedies–the Wild West and Medicine shows that toured the country in the last decades of the 19th century. Many of these shows featured apperances or even performances by Native people, and he suggests that it is in this venue that Native American standup comedy was born. At the same time, he also points out the darkness that lurks in these early comedic performances–that the performers were often given the choice of touring with such shows or going to prison, or that the abject poverty of Native communities who were imprisoned on reservations forced many people to take this work as the only means of livelihood available. That story, plus the horror of the residential school systems where Indigenous children were taken from their families and had their culture violently beaten out of them, set the context for the stories of comedians that unfold over the course of the rest of the book.
Thus, this is a book about finding laughter in horror and violence, not as satire or ridicule, but as a means of coping with oppression and surviving in spite of it.
The book tells the stories of several 20th century Native comedians, and juxtaposes their experiences with the newer generations of 21st century comedians who are working today. The former are documented in Nesteroff’s usual exhaustive and rich style, and include characters like Will Rogers (Cherokee), Jackie Curtiss (Mohawk),and most importantly the Oneida stand-up Charlie Hill, from whose most famous joke the book takes its title. Hill’s career and influence are the beating heart of the book, and it is his appearances on television and in comedy festivals that influence many of the contemporary comics that Nesteroff profiles, including Adrianne Chalepah, Larry Omaha, Dakota Ray Hebert, and the sketch comedy troupe the 1491s.
A few overarching themes emerge from this astonishing and broad book. First, many Native comedians see themselves as pushing against a White idea of Native people as serious, stoic, and humorless. This idea is rooted in the romantic (and racist) ideology of the “vanishing indian” perhaps most famously personified in the “crying indian” commercial from the 1970s. But for many Native comedians, this idea has been flipped on its head, and throughout the book there are frequent discussions of the role of humor in Native communities (and comics) as a means of managing, reckoning with, and addressing the trauma of colonization, residential school abuse, land and cultural theft, and genocide. Nesteroff largely lets contemporary Native comedians tell their own stories, a deliberate choice that diverges from “The Comedians” and foregrounds the relationship between their lives and their artistry, and how they lived with or resisted that darkness.
Nesteroff notes the role that comedy and satire played in the American Indian Movement, touching on people like the poet and musician John Trudell (Santee Dakota) who was part of the alcatraz takeover in 1967, and Vine Deloria Jr (Standing Rock Sioux), whose famous book “Custer Died For Your Sins” was a critical but humorous look at the place of Indigenous people in 20th century American society. The relationship of politics on Native comedy was clearly deeply embedded–Charlie Hill raised money for Leonard Peltier’s defense, and many activists used their platforms to improve the often racist representations of Native people in popular media. Thus, the very presence of Native people onstage or on television was itself political, and Native artists frequently utilized that power to advance a Native or even decolonization agenda.
There’s a lot more in this book–rich discussions of the American Indian Movement, profiles of struggling or up-and-coming Native comedians and the difficulties they face, and fascinating discussions of informal performance circuits like Pow-Wows or the “Silver Circle clubs” in Nevada. It’s also a rich introduction to 20th century Indigenous history and culture, largely from the perspectives of Native people themselves. Absolutely recommended.
