9781553651376_cover Enlarge Cover
5 of 5
2 ratings
rated!
rated!
list price: $22.95
edition:Paperback
category: Social Science
published: Dec 2005
ISBN:9781553651376
publisher: Douglas & McIntyre

Me Funny

edited by Drew Hayden Taylor

tagged: native american studies
Description

An irreverent, insightful take on our First Nations’ great gift to Canada, delivered by a stellar cast of contributors.

Humour 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. 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 fifteen years writing and researching Aboriginal humour. For this book, he asked a leading group of writers from a variety of fields—among them such celebrated wordsmiths as Thomas King, Lee Maracle and Tomson Highway—to take a look at what makes Aboriginal humour tick. Their challenging, informative and hilarious contributions examine the use of humour in areas as diverse as stand-up comedy, fiction, visual art, drama, performance, poetry, traditional storytelling and education. As Me Funny makes clear, there is no single definition of Aboriginal humour. But the contributors do agree on some common ground: Native humour pushes the envelope. With this collection, readers will have the unforgettable opportunity to appreciate that for themselves.

About the Author

Drew Hayden Taylor

Ojibway writer Drew Hayden Taylor is from the Curve Lake Reserve in Ontario. Hailed by the Montreal Gazette as one of Canada’s leading Native dramatists, he writes for the screen as well as the stage and contributes regularly to North American Native periodicals and national newspapers. His plays have garnered many prestigious awards, and his beguiling and perceptive storytelling style has enthralled audiences in Canada, the United States and Germany. His 1998 play Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth has been anthologized in Seventh Generation: An Anthology of Native American Plays, published by the Theatre Communications Group. Although based in Toronto, Taylor has travelled extensively throughout North America, honouring requests to read from his work and to attend arts festivals, workshops and productions of his plays. He was also invited to Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute in California, where he taught a series of seminars on the depiction of Native characters in fiction, drama and film. One of his most established bodies of work includes what he calls the Blues Quartet, an ongoing, outrageous and often farcical examination of Native and non-Native stereotypes.
Awards
  • Winner, First Americans in the Arts - Outstanding Achievement in Literary Works

Buy the e-book:

X
Contacting facebook
Please wait...