American & Canadian Literature

Me Funny

Name: Me Funny
Author: Drew Hayden Taylor
ISBN: 9781926685724

by Drew Hayden Taylor (Compiler)

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Overview

Humor has always been an essential part of North American aboriginal culture. This fact remained unnoticed by most settlers, however, since non-aboriginals just didn’t get the joke. For most of written history, a stern, unyielding profile of “the Indian” dominated the popular mainstream imagination. Indians, it was believed, never laughed. But Indians themselves always knew better. As an award-winning playwright, columnist, and comedy-sketch creator, Drew Hayden Taylor has spent 15 years writing and researching aboriginal humor. For Me Funny, he asked a noted cast of writers from a variety of fields — including such celebrated wordsmiths as Thomas King, Allan J. Ryan, Mirjam Hirch, and Tomson Highway — to take a look at what makes aboriginal humor tick. Their hilarious, enlightening contributions playfully examine the use of humor in areas as diverse as stand-up comedy, fiction, visual art, drama, performance, poetry, traditional storytelling, and education.

About the Author, Drew Hayden Taylor

Drew Hayden Taylor is widely known for his thoughtful and sharply witty observations on aboriginal subjects and issues. As one of Canada’s leading playwrights, he has received some of the country’s most prestigious drama awards for his work, which includes Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth and the three-part series The Bootlegger Blues, The Baby Blues and The Buz’Gem Blues. Hayden Taylor also writes for the screen, and his National Film Board of Canada documentary on Aboriginal humour, Redskins, Tricksters and Puppy Stew, has been shown all across North America.

Audiences as far afield as France, Germany and Australia have welcomed Hayden Taylor's beguiling storytelling style, and he has given lectures on several continents about Native humour. In 2004 he emceed and performed at an event devoted to the subject at Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., to celebrate the opening of the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian.. His trenchant opinions on identity politics and the hilarious absurdities that are often the lot of a “blue-eyed Ojibway” are collected in book form in the Funny, You Don’t Look Like One series.

Drew Hayden Taylor is an Ojibway from Ontario’s Curve Lake Reserve. He currently lives in Toronto.

Contributors:

Thomas King
Tomson Highway
Lee Maracle
Drew Hayden Taylor
Allan J. Ryan
Don Kelly
Mirjam Hirch
Karen Froman
Janice Acoose
Louise Profeit-LeBlanc
Kristina Fagan