Introduction desertasi humor ing the local

1 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 Introduction

One definition of ‗to humor‘ is to give in to another party‘s desire. In this dissertation, I expand the meaning of humor-ing in order to provide a theoretical frame for this study. Humor-ing the Local in Hawai‗i is more than just complying with the desires of Local people and putting them in a good mood. 1 Local humor is a practice; thus, ‗humor-ing the Local ‘ means engaging in the practices of Local humor to constitute Localness. Furthermore, humor-ing the Local cannot be detached from its context; such humor is not only about Local people, but is also about their social space. In short, through being hyphenated, ‗humor-ing‘ highlights humor as a performative action that constitutes a sense of togetherness and locality; I argue that one of the potential achievements of humor-ing the Local, or doing Local humor, is constructing who Local people are. Doing Local humor is a located practice in social life. The locatedness of humor- ing tells us that nothing is intrinsically funny; thus, the practice of humor-ing means using semiotic resources and ideologies in a course of actions and jointly making them into humor as an interactional achievement, thereby managing the relational constitutionality of categories and category-bound actions and attributes. Locality, identity, and humor are all interactional achievements within the realm of performance, ideology, and the moral universe. 1 I make a distinction between a ―little l‖ local and a ―big L‖ Local throughout this chapter to distinguish Local residents from long-term local residents who are not from Hawai‗i. A stereotypical Local is a de scendant of plantation laborers and must be born and raised in Hawai‗i. 2 To illustrate the complex multivocal practices that this dissertation examines, I begin this dissertation with an example from a performance by the comedian Andy Bumatai. 2 In the excerpt, Andy Bumatai AB topicalizes a controversy caused by a parody song that was produced by another comedian, Frank DeLima FD. 3 After some introductory comments, Bumatai re-enacts a conversation between DeLima and himself. Utilizing different voices through reported speech and mock language, he re-enacts a scenario in which DeLima plays his answering machine messages for Bumatai, thus revealing that many of the messages are angry responses to DeLima‘s comedy. In this narrated event, Bumatai voices multiple characters: 1 DeLima, who is telling Bumatai about this incident; 2 Bumatai, who is responding to DeLima; and 3 one of the Filipino complainants F who left a message on DeLima‘s answering machine See appendix for transcription conventions. Excerpt 1 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 AB Aud AB Aud you know put a lot of heat . frank delima. filipinos are leaving threatening messages on his . answering ma[chine. [laughter yea:h . he played the machine for me. FD “↑andy listen to this weeping listen to this.” F “↑you stop telling daet filipino joke . I‟m going to poke you wit de knife.”= =laughter 2 Andy Bumatai started his career as a stand-up comedian in 1977 and played the breaks for Frank DeLima. He was also a member of Booga Booga, a popular comic trio, for about a year. He won a H ōkū award for the Most P romising Artist in 1979 and won three more H ōkū awards for the Comedy Album of the Year. The N ā Hōkū Hanohano Awards are the most prestigious awards in the entertainment industry in Hawai‗i. Bumatai also did TV specials including School Daze and All in the Ohana. He ‗gave the mainland a shot‘ in the mid 1980s and lived outside of L.A. for t en years. He came back to Hawai‗i to perform at comedy clubs in Waik īkī in the 1990s. 3 Frank DeLima has had the longest career among the comedians whose performances I discuss in the dissertation. He has been one of Hawai ‗i‘s most popular comedians for more than thirty years. He has won numerous awards that include nine H ōkū awards for the Comedy Album of the Year 1982-83, 1987-90, 1992, 1996-97, 2000. 3 10 11 12 13 14 AB Aud F “↑you know what joke I‟m talking about? . daet one ” .h DeL ima‟s Christmas Carol Filipino Christmas. “[bʊɹʊnsɔndɔn bʊɹʊgɪndɔŋ [bɑkɑdɑŋpɑŋ].” 4 [laughter Here, Bumatai builds a scene by voicing DeLima, who plays a message for Bumatai. Next, Bumatai voices a Filipino character by us ing ‗Filipino accented‘ English and, in so doing, criticizes DeLima‘s parody song lines 7-8. In other words, Bumatai presents a Filipino character who is critical about Filipino jokes, deploying reported speech as a critique of ethnic humor that mocks Filipinos. The reported speech is also an enactment of ethnic humor that mocks Filipinos, and hence, is a fascinating example of how language use in comedy can have several layers of meanings. In the last line of the excerpt, Bumatai continues with his act, voicing the Filipino character who now sings a part of DeLima‘s offending song. In other words, Bumatai imitates a Filipino character who imitates Frank DeLima, who originally imitates a Filipino, to which the audience responds with laughter. This dissertation examines many such instances of multivocality in and around contexts of comedic performances in Hawai ‗i. 5 Specifically, I examine the language used in stand-up comedy routines to explore the identities and indexicalities that are produced through com bining English, Hawai‗i Creole, and other semiotic resources. This 4 Line 13 seems nonsense, but might be considered to have three parts. The third part, [b ɑkɑdɑŋpɑŋ], might remind one of an Ilokano last name used in Hawai‗i i.e., Makadangdang. 5 The dissertation also discusses other comedians; for instance, Augie T is one of the most popular comediansentertainers in Hawai ‗i and performs in the mainland U.S., too. He has won several awards that include two H ōkū awards for the Comedy Album of the Year 1999 and 2003. In 2002, he was also named the Comedian of the Year by two local newspapers, the Midweek and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Jose Dynamite and Timmy Mattos often perform in Augie T‘s show. Another comedian I focus attention on in the dissertation is Bo Irvine. He has been performing for mainland and local audiences sinc e 1987. He is the winner of NBC‘s Last Comic Standing 2008 Hawai‘i Showcase . He has worked with numerous national comedians. His colleagues in Comedy Polynesia include Kento, Chief Sielu, and Michael Staats. 4 dissertation has three goals: 1 to unpack the notion of language as a code; 2 to anchor code in relation to ethnicity, place, and performance; and 3 to uncover how code relates to the notions of comedic performance and performativity. This dissertation examines the linguistic and interactional structure of comedic performances by examining the kinds of language alternation that are used, specifically focusing on participant orientations as a guide for determining what is constituted, displayed, and made relevant in interaction. Because comedy is a strongly dialogic, performative genre that produces multiple readings, the dissertation also explores how these performances are interpreted among hearers. This aspect of the dissertation is particularly important to the field of sociolinguistics due to the multilingual and multiethnic context of Hawai‗i, where a great deal of the humor draws on ethnic and linguistic stereotypes, and hence, may be interpreted in various ways. Hawai‗i‘s demographics make a clear contrast to those of the continental U.S. The discursive examination of multilingual, multicultural, and multiracial Hawai‗i complicates our understanding about sociolinguistic issues, models, and theories. Hawai‗i is an interesting site because it is connected with the other Polynesian islands through the oceans and because politically speaking, it is part of the United States while geographically separated from the continental U.S. 6 Casual observation tells us that many Hawai‗i residents refer to themselves as Local; in addition, they do not use hyphenated references such as Japanese-American; instead, they describe their ethnicity by referring only to their ethnic heritage, such as Japanese. 6 Sai 2008 argues that the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893 was illegal according to international laws and that since th en, the United States has continued the illegal occupation of Hawai‗i. 5 According to the dominant racial ideology in the United States, however, the majority of Hawai‗i residents are Asian-Americans that are considered ‗minorities‘ in this nation- state; for instance, the literary tradition of Hawai‗i was marginalized Sumida, 1991 and still is. Discussing the meaning of the term Asian- American among Hawai‗i residents, Okamura 1994 claims that ―[t]here is essentially an unfamiliarity with the political significance of the concept rather than a conscious disapproval of i t‖ p. 161. To put this differently, the majority of Hawai‗i residents are Locals Okamura, 1994, but at the same time they are being marginalized as minorities in the national context of the United States. My goal is to identify and demonstrate the ways people show sensitivity to these linguistic, cultural, and racial ideologies and their effects in the contexts of performance and meta-performance. The ideologies that link code, performance, and social relations in Hawai‗i are multilayered and multifaceted; they are the basis of crosscultural humor, parody, and mockery and resist ahistorical reductionism. In order to capture the complexity of social life in the genre of comedy, I draw on theoretical frameworks and analytical tools from linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and discourse and conversation analytic research, to which I attempt to make contributions. First, at the level of theory, I analyze how comedians produce humor by exploiting Hawai ‗i‘s linguistic resources. Drawing on the work on performance by Bauman and Briggs 1990, I describe these comedic performances as performances-in- interaction because the comedians‘ verbal actions are produced dialogically with the audiences and are shaped by audience responses such as laughter. My analysis of the linguistic aspects of these performances-in-interaction focuses on the sociolinguistic phenomenon of mockery Hill, 2001 in multilingual and multicultural contexts. This 6 dissertation also explores the crucial role of culturally-specific knowledge in analyzing performances-in-interaction. Shared knowledge constitutes, and is constituted by, interaction in situ or in a specific context. To analyze this reflexive process, I examine the construction of intertextual knowledge in an explicitly interactional context. In the remainder of this chapter, I discuss the key components of my dissertation. Section 2 presents research questions. In Section 3, these questions lead to a literature review of sociolinguistic research on performance and multivocal humor; that is, this section identifies what we know in sociolinguistics about these topics. Section 4 discusses how Hawai‗i complicates our sociolinguistic knowledge, and to aid readers in interpreting the performance data, it presents background information on the history of Hawai‗i Creole as well as the context of Hawai‗i comedy.

1.2 Research questions