Comedian pokes holes in white attitude

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As a child, Charlie Hill secretly wished to be a stand-up comedian. He would sneak out of his bed and watch the original host of the Tonight Show, Jack Paar, make people laugh. He was also inspired by Dick Gregory, Jackie Gleason and Red Skelton, as well as Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy as his career blossomed. But it took focus and hard work. It required him to stick to his convictions and not take roles that were stereotypes, and it has made him one of the most well-known Native comedians, in Canada or the United States.

"What I do, I don't really call 'Indian humor.' It's more of a satire," he said, after a performance in Toronto on June 10. "Real Indian humor is something in your community or your home, and the funniest people are maybe your uncle, or a cab driver, or someone on the rez. It's something only people with Indian experience get. It's something that's personal to us. . . It's something beautiful."

Even when Hill is far away from his Los Angeles home, he never feels out of place as long as Native people are around. Born in Oneida, Wisc., an indeterminate number of years ago, to an Oneida father and a Cree mother from Alberta, Hill is able to call both sides of the border his home. But he quickly pointed out the border is an illusion.

"We have the BIA, here it's DIA. The prime minister is the president. It's the same. Just different names. And their policies are the same towards Indians. Never to our advantage," he said. Whether in Canada or the United States, for about 20 years, Hill has been making audiences laugh with his perceptions of the Native experience.

What is funny to Hill is that he's one of the first standup comics to come out of a culture that is inundated with laughter, especially from powwow announcers and clowns. After watching him perform and hearing the audience's enthusiastic laughter, it's hard to imagine him ever having a bad night. But his very first gig as a professional standup comic was a disaster.

"I got a gig at a college in Los Angeles: El Camino College. I got $50," he said. "I went over there and they had my name on a big sign. I was real embarrassed because I'd never seen my name up like that before, and I thought, geeze, I've never played anywhere before.

"I went up on the stage and nobody introduced me, and there was no microphone, and it was an awful crowd. I stood and looked at my feet and mumbled. I took the 50 bucks and I learned a million things. It was real humbling.

"You train in bombing. For every good night I had, I can name a thousand ones that didn't work," he said, laughing.

The good nights, however, have included appearances on the Tonight Show with both Johnny Carson and Jay Leno; Late Night with David Letterman and the Arsenio Hall Show. He's written and acted for Roseanne, after he turned down an offer to appear on her show for a Thanksgiving episode he thought was disrespectful to Native people. She told him to tell her what the show should be about, so he co-wrote the episode and that led to a writing position on the show. But it was his friend and hero Richard Pryor who gave him his first real break.

"He saw me in a club when I was just starting out and he said, 'you talk to these white people like they're dogs. We got to get together, brother,'" he said. "He's always been real nice to me and always had a high regard for Native people."

Pryor invited Hill to appear on his television show in 1977, which attracted the attention of Hollywood. But Hill was appalled at what was being offered there.

"A lot of Hollywood people looked at me as a kind of novelty act [but] what I did was make people laugh with us, not at us," he said. "You know, I could probably be a millionaire if I went out and did some Uncle Tom-Tom act and played Dumb-Indian-Me-Not-Know.

"When I was in Hollywood, I had a lot of offers to do sitcoms, and they were from the white point of view with their values and it was all a bunch of crap," he continued. "I turned it all don."

Even an offer from famed television producer Norman Lear to work on a sitcom about Indians living in New York City couldn't move him because the material was based on stereotypes. CBS came back to him again with a similar idea. Hill wanted to know how they were going to approach the show and found out the writers had worked on The Beverly Hillbillies, and saw Indians in New York in the same way!

"What I talk about is often a threat to white people. It's a threat to whatever they stand for," he said. "To me 'white' is an attitude. It's not a skin color. . . . It's whoever doesn't have a sense of humor, and it doesn't matter if you're Native or not."

Hill's act has matured as he's grown older and had a family, admitting that he was more acerbic and blunt when he started out. He still pokes holes in white attitudes but finds growing as a person has made him a better comedian.

"My goal is to be an old man like George Burns. I'd be this militant comic [because] who's going to doubt an old Indian man," he said.