American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it. If Bakhtin is right, laughter might be the perfect instrument of imperialism. Yet, at least from our twentieth-century vantage point, America’s early imperialists - the Puritans - seem like the most humorless of folk. Indeed, most of the moments of laughter left in the colonial records are jokes made by Algonquians and other Indians. It would seem that humor was the perfect tool for cracking the shell of the Puritan ”white-backs,” a way of turning upside down those human beings Paula Gunn Allen has called ”America’s first boat people.” In colonial texts, Algonquian humor disrupts the colonists’ attempts at distance and superiority, forcing the settlers into an uncomfortable familiarity.