Host: Jokes are about more than punch lines. They're often based in shared culture and community. So what sets indigenous comedy apart and can humour build connection? Drew Hayden Taylor is a playwright, author, and journalist, and he joins us in our studios. How are you doing, sir?

Drew Hayden Taylor: I haven't decided yet.

Host: Well, tell me after the interview.

Drew Hayden Taylor: I'll get back to that.

Host: All right. Well, we invited you because you had an op ed in the Globe and Mail recently that caught our interest. A theatre critic took issue with your play, The Undeniable Accusations of Red Cadmium Light. Let's take a step back. What's the play about?

Drew Hayden Taylor: Well, that actually is more complicated than you would think. The overall premise is an exploration of the forgeries of Norval Morrisseau. The title Red Cadmium Light is how a lot of people can tell if some of the play, some of the plays, some of the paintings are fake because he developed a fondness for red cadmium light to use in skin tones, but it wasn't created until 1982. So when forgers attribute a painting to 1976 and it has red cadmium light in it, they know it's a fake. So that's the premise. But from that's just a springboard to the second storyline, which is about this woman who's an expert on the works of Norval Morrisseau and is often brought in to consult on what's real and what's not. It turns out she's not native. She's been advertising herself as a native expert. She has an art gallery on a reserve, etc. but it turns out she's not native. So that becomes plot number two. But for me, it's actually about a relationship between a mother and a daughter, because the daughter finds this out. The stepdaughter, the woman had married her father, who was a native artist daughter, finds out that her mother has been lying to her for 30 years. And to me, that's the play.

Host: Now, obviously some serious tones there, but there was a lot of humour as well, which, well, everything.

Drew Hayden Taylor: I do has a lot of humour.

Host: And so I want to pick up on the review itself. What irked you about the review?

Drew Hayden Taylor: I don't have the exact terminology, but the reviewer basically commented that there was a lot of laughter in the room for a lot of humour that she didn't quite understand, and then she just sort of threw in a line, basically saying something like, oh, maybe it has something to do with that First Nations sense of humour, and then left it at that. And that sort of had me puzzled, because I've spent 35 years celebrating, exploring and deconstructing indigenous humour and regular humour. And I have to say that I actually find that there are more similarities than differences.

Host: Well, your headline of your op ed was "Don't get indigenous humour? The joke's on you." And we should preface that writers typically don't get to write the headlines, but what helps, what interests you about the way that mainstream audiences sort of respond to indigenous humour?

Drew Hayden Taylor: Well, as I said, 90% of the time they get it. I have had about 120 productions of my work across Canada, and I think there's only like two indigenous theatre companies in Canada. So 99% of my plays are produced by mainstream theatre companies that are very successful. People do get the humour. One of my plays, Cottagers and Indians, has been produced about a dozen times in the last ten years, and there's a lot of humour in it and it's poking at white people for a large part. But I go to the play and the audience is 90, 95% non-native and they're enjoying the humour they are. As I said, there's more similarities than differences.

Host: Do you prefer if we talk about sort of the landscape in the theatre business? But if the critic themselves is indigenous?

Drew Hayden Taylor: That's that's one of the issues for discussion. There's a wonderful woman named Yolanda Bonnell who basically wrote wrote an article asking older white theatre critics not to come to her or not to review her plays because she says, it's not for you. And I'm not quite that severe about it because my my mortgage knows no skin colour. And I think anybody can get indigenous humour. I'm not reinventing the wheel here. I think it's just people who don't get a joke, just want to blame something or someone. So they blamed the indigenous playwright and indigenous sense of humour.

Host: Now you also write about comedy that didn't appeal to you, like the The Three Stooges or a play like Molière. Two very different types of comedy is comedy from dominant cultures. Not funny to you?

Drew Hayden Taylor: Oh no, I like, but I have a broad spectrum of humour. I remember I like everything from talking about contemporary sitcoms, everything from Married with Children to Frasier. You know, I love a good cheap joke. Also I like a sophisticated joke, and I try and find my way in between and do the same. Some of my humour is primarily for the indigenous audience, and some of my humour is for a mainstream audience that some indigenous people wouldn't get. So I play to all crowds.

Host: With that, you know, this country over the decades has to has to reckon with sort of its past. And I'm curious, how is colonialism affected the humour and the stories that you're able to tell?

Drew Hayden Taylor: I once did a conference on multicultural humour in Kerala, India. And I was I was there and it was just a series of people doing presentations on various kinds of humour. And I followed a woman from the University of Tel Aviv who did a presentation on humour and the Holocaust. So basically what I've sort of found, not found, but I've observed that a lot of indigenous humour, like a lot of Jewish humour, is survival humour. Colonization has had effect on a lot of on most indigenous people in some way. And that is reflected in our humour because frequently our humour is is a comment on or a reaction to the world around us. So frequently a lot of our humour is generated by the side effects of colonialism.

Host: Have you ever felt like you needed to water down some of your scripts, some of your plays, to make it more palatable?

Drew Hayden Taylor: Not afterwards. No. Like, I'm not a, I don't, I like to poke the bear, but I don't like to stab the bear. Okay. Right. So I'm.

Host: What's the difference?

Drew Hayden Taylor: The difference is, do I want to make people laugh and go, oh, you got me, as opposed to I find that insulting. I'm not trying to insult people because once you insult people, the door closes. But I don't think there's anything wrong with showing flaws or things like that in, in the play that maybe people can acknowledge and laugh at. You know, one of, one of the things I often talk about is my definition of settlers, of white people. People of pallor, colour challenged, pigment denied. I've read that right. And those aren't really vicious, but they do comment on political correctness.

Host: Do white people take offence to that? Have you gotten people who've come?

Drew Hayden Taylor: Yes. On occasion. Well, I did this one line. Somebody asked me to tell a joke about about colonization. Right. And one of them was, why do native people hate snow? Because it's white and all over our land. And somebody came, somebody either emailed me or made a comment on something and basically said that single joke, I have set back reconciliation ten years. Wow. Right. So yeah, some people don't don't get it.

Host: On the flip side, have you, you know, indigenous people come at you and said, hey, I think you went too far on that. Is there anything that's technically off limits? Not for you as well?

Drew Hayden Taylor: Yeah, I mean, I don't want any enemies. One of my plays actually, one of my plays alternatives, which is a dinner party between three native people and three white people. And it gets very political. It got a bomb threat once. Somebody left a message saying, if this theatre doesn't stop producing plays that are racist against white people, don't be surprised at what we do. Wow. So there are, you know, there are people out there who have issues.

Host: And has there been a story or stories that you're like, you know what? That's not for me. I'm not going to do that story.

Drew Hayden Taylor: Oh yeah. There's so many different. Everybody says everything is fair game. But I don't know, like, you know, child abuse is not funny. And I don't really know how you would make that funny. Spousal abuse. You know, there are things that just are generally not funny. Some people may argue that you can make anything funny. Maybe if that's the path you want to follow, it's it's not the direction I want to go.

Host: Residential schools.

Drew Hayden Taylor: It depends, you know, there are at the time of contact when John Cabot landed on the East Coast, it's estimated there were 50 to 60 separate languages and dialects spoken in Canada. And there are something like 634 First Nation communities in Canada. And I'd have to say almost every community has its own unique brand of humour. So you're asking me this when I have no right to answer for all indigenous people, there's still a few out there that don't want me to answer for them.

Host: Makes sense. I want to talk about some successes here. When we talk about indigenous comedies, Reservation Dogs and North of 60, which I loved.

Drew Hayden Taylor: There's also another one. There was one called Rutherford Falls.

Host: Okay.

Drew Hayden Taylor: That was a sitcom on NBC, I think for two years, and it was absolutely delightful.

Host: I will add it to the list, but help me understand why have those shows broken through. What is it about this moment that's happening?

Drew Hayden Taylor: I think the dominant culture is willing to sit up and look at different ways of looking at Canada, or looking at America or whatever. Years ago, when I did my very first comedy, it was called The Bootlegger Blues, and it's a play about a 58 year old, good Christian Ojibwe woman who, through a series of circumstances, finds herself in possession of 143 cases of beer that she has to bootleg in order to buy an organ for the church. And it's loosely based on a true story. Okay, my mother was so mad when I wrote that play, but making a very long story short, first time it was produced in a in a mainstream theatre company. I was sitting there, 300 seats full of, of, of, of non-native people. How can I put this delicately, with a bluish tinge to their hair? Okay, comedy starts up. Nobody's laughing. Absolute silence. And I'm suddenly thinking, oh, you know, there goes my career as a playwright and I'm trying to figure out what's going on. But there were eight native people in the audience because they were related to the actors, and they were in a balcony. They're up there. They started laughing almost immediately, but they were the only ones. The native people started laughing and the most interesting thing happened. After about five minutes, the people around the native people started laughing. Another five minutes, another circle of people started laughing. It was like throwing a rock in a pond and the circles getting.

Host: Gave them permission to.

Drew Hayden Taylor: They were. They were waiting for permission to laugh. And as I said, nowadays I have. This year alone, I'll have five productions of my of my plays, most of them comedically oriented, produced in mainstream theatre companies. I had one in Vancouver, one in Thunder Bay, one in Winnipeg. I've got one opening tonight in Port Dover, one in about three weeks in Port Colborne, and so on and so on. And the audience will be mostly non-native and fingers crossed, they will find it. They'll find it hilarious. They funny.

Host: True. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join us in the studio for this conversation.

Drew Hayden Taylor: As we say in my reserve. Grazie.