Taking the Joke Further

“Weird,” wrote Ian Frazier for the NYR Online on August 13, “[Tim] Walz’s now famous one-word description of Trump & Co. is solidly Nebraskan and from the school of Carson.” This forthright Midwestern quality, Frazier argues, is what distinguishes Kamala Harris’s running mate from the last several generations of presidential and vice-presidential candidates. “Governor and Mrs. Walz lift my spirits because they break the Democrats’ pattern of seeming to prefer the coasts.”

Frazier, an Ohioan, is the author of more than a dozen books, including Great Plains (1989), a travelogue-cum-history of the plains states; On the Rez (2000), an account of life in the Oglala Sioux nation; and several collections of reporting, travel writing, and humor. He has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1974, and he has been writing for the Review since 2000, where he has written about Crazy Horse, the Arctic, James Agee, and American farming. His most recent book, Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough, was published this month.

This week I e-mailed Frazier to ask him about the charms of the Midwest, the tradition of Native American comedy, and how to write a good Shouts and Murmurs column.

Daniel Drake: You mention your formative time in Chadron, Nebraska—which I take to be time you spent in part researching Great Plains. What drew you there in the first place, or, put another way, how did you decide to focus on that part of the Midwest instead of, say, your home state, Ohio? (Incidentally, as a Chicagoan, I understand Ohio to be debatably Midwestern—I’d be curious for your thoughts on that matter, too!)

Ian Frazier: I spent time in Chadron researching two books: Great Plains and On the Rez. For the first, I was working at the Museum of the Fur Trade, which has a lot of research materials about the plains in the early to mid-nineteenth century. I also used the archives at the Fort Robinson History Center, in nearby Crawford, for information about the killing of Crazy Horse. I had already published a collection of reporting pieces and a collection of humorous essays, but Great Plains was my first long nonfiction book. I did it because I was living in Montana and I loved driving on the plains.

For On the Rez, I stayed in Chadron because it’s near Pine Ridge (in South Dakota), and the book is mostly about the Oglala Sioux reservation there. Additionally, the library at Chadron College has the archives of local newspapers on microfilm, another source of information about Pine Ridge.

I wrote about Ohio in my second nonfiction book, Family (1994). As to whether it’s Midwestern or not—I say it’s Midwestern, all the way. Having driven to it from New York or New Jersey countless times, I always love coming out of western Pennsylvania and into eastern Ohio on Interstate 80. At that point you are leaving the Allegheny Mountains and entering flat country. You are in the Midwest. 

For the Review, you’ve often written about Native American history and politics. How did that interest start? What are some issues in contemporary Native American politics that you wish people knew more about, or that you think demand more national attention?

Where I grew up, in rural Ohio, you could find arrowheads. On a rise above a local creek, I found what I imagined to be a whole village site. I went over that ground inch by inch, found countless broken arrowheads and flint chips, and even a few possible potsherds. This entranced me. I liked cowboys and Indians, like a lot of kids of the 1950s, but preferred Indians. My grandparents lived in Tucson, and I admired the pueblo tribes. As a kid I had books and more books about Indians. I just carried this love into adulthood.

People may think Native Americans are of the past. They’re of the present and future. They knew how to live on this wonderfully varied continent and did it no harm for twenty or thirty thousand years. Then Europeans showed up and radically trashed it in half a millennium. If Native people say, “Don’t build that pipeline,” don’t build it.

Everybody, including Native people themselves, should take the problem of alcoholism more seriously. I had trouble finding an AA meeting on Pine Ridge! There should be a few dozen AA meetings all over the rez every day. Substance abuse runs through rural places like hellfire and not enough is being done to fight it.

You previously wrote for us about the tradition of Native American comedy, which seems to me, in its way, not unrelated to the tradition of Midwestern comedy of which Johnny Carson is a part. Is that dry, understated sensibility a place where your taste in comedy runs? Or, more broadly, what kind of comedy (and which comedians) do you find you’ve returned to most often in your life?

Ohio was my cradle for humor. We could claim the best humor writer of all time—James Thurber, from Columbus. I read all his books, and I knew his work by heart. As for comedy on TV and on LP records, there was Jonathan Winters, who was from Dayton. I can still do whole long bits from his records; so can my friends from childhood. Thurber and Winters are the foundational funny Ohioans for me.

I knew Native American humor first-hand from my friends Leonard Walks Out and his brother Floyd John. I met them in New York City and knew them for years before I started hanging out with them on Pine Ridge. The Native American comedians I wrote about in that review were unknown to me as a kid. I learned about them later. My nominee for one of the funniest actor/comedians ever is Dallas Goldtooth—he was in the TV show Reservation Dogs—who is a Sioux from Minnesota and so also a Midwesterner.

Richard Pryor is the funniest comedian of the last fifty years. I saw him live at Madison Square Garden in 1977 or 1978. He was from Peoria, Illinois. Lenny Bruce was an extremely important and even revolutionary comedian on the national scene, and Mel Brooks had the most powerful gift for the big, big picture. The Midwest can claim neither of them. In the end, humor has an ephemeral and hard-to-define connection to where you’re from.  

You’ve written many a Shout and Murmur in your years with The New Yorker. What do you think are the elements of a good short humor piece?

Humor pieces in The New Yorker used to be called “casuals.” That was the in-office term going back to Harold Ross, the magazine’s founder. A casual was usually the first piece in the magazine after the Talk of the Town department. It could be as short as a single column of type or as long as several pages. Casuals were not identified in any way—they had a title, like a fiction piece, and stood on their own as pieces of writing. In the early 1990s that tradition changed, and humor pieces were labeled Shouts and Murmurs to let readers know they were funny. I still think of my humor pieces as casuals.

What makes for a good piece of written humor is another of the mysteries of art. A humor piece is a kind of poem. Each sentence has to pull more weight than a sentence in a reported piece or even in a work of fiction. Here is an example, from a humor piece called “What I’d Say to the Martians,” by Jack Handey: “I came here in peace, seeking gold and slaves, but you have treated me like an intruder.” Each word in that sentence takes the joke further, each word is essential.