The Approximate Size of His Favorite Humor: Sherman Alexie's Comic Connections and Disconnections in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

In Sherman Alexie's recent directorial debut,The Business of Fancydancing (viewed in April, 2002, at the Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema), the primary character, Seymour, is a Spokane Indian who moves to Seattle to attend college and pursue fame as a poet. ¹ Many of his Indian friends who remain on the reservation accuse him of selling out to white society. To a degree the film investigates Alexie's own choices and their repercussions. Although he often earns praise as a clever manipulator of language, Alexie, like Seymour, is also censured for his depictions of Indians and Indian culture, particularly from other Indian writers. His critics characterize his writing as harmful pandering to white expectations, arguing that Alexie not only avoids the moral and social obligation to educate white readers and reinstill cultural pride in Indian readers, he also works actively against such goals with his humor. For example, Louis Owens writes that Alexie's humor "deflects any 'lesson in morality'" (76); Gloria Bird decries Alexie's characters as "social and cultural anomalies" (49); and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn argues that he neglects "art as an ethical endeavor or the artist as responsible social critic" (126). To many critics his playfulness may demonstrate skill as a writer, but it betrays Indian people by presenting them as clichés who deserve to be laughed at.

In this essay I will argue that Alexie's humor is central to a constructive social and moral purpose evident throughout his fiction but particularly in his collection of short stories,The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. He uses humor—or his characters use humor—to reveal injustice, protect self-esteem, heal wounds, and create bonds. The function of humor changes from scene to scene, shifting to serve these myriad goals. In Indi'n Humor Kenneth Lincoln explains the many different roles of humor within Indian communities. He describes "the contrary powers of Indian humor" as "[t]he powers to heal and to hurt, to bond and to exorcize, to renew and to purge" (5). Like the legendary Trickster figure, humor in Indian communities embodies shifting meanings and serves conflicting ends. However, rather than a sign of his "hip" irreverence for all things Indian, Alexie's sophisticated use of humor unsettles conventional ways of thinking and compels re-evaluation and growth, which ultimately allows Indian characters to connect to their heritage in novel ways and forces non-Indian readers to reconsider simplistic generalizations.

In his best work to date,The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, humor allows his characters to display strengths and hide weaknesses, to expose prejudices and avoid realities, and to create bonds and construct barricades. These "contrary powers" often coexist simultaneously, requiring the characters and readers to position and then reposition themselves within shifting personal and cultural contexts. Alexie's cross-cultural humor alternately engages readers—creating positive connections between individuals of diverse backgrounds—and disrupts communities (both Indian and white), erecting barriers that make constructive communication difficult. Here lies its principle challenge for readers. Alexie's shifting treatment of humor serves as a means of connection as well as an instrument of separation. However, it is precisely this complexity and plasticity that allow him to negotiate successfully the differences between Indian communities and mainstream American society, while simultaneously instigating crucial dialogue about social and moral issues especially important to Indian communities.

Humor is defined by its fluidity, its paradoxes, and its ability to surprise. In a discussion of Native American Indian creativity in Mixedblood Messages, Louis Owens helpfully conceptualizes a literary postmodern "frontier" as "always unstable, multidirectional, hybridized, characterized by heteroglossia, and indeterminate" (26). More importantly, within this "frontier" exists "the dangerous presence of that trickster at the heart of the Native American imagination" (26...