A real estate problem

Was it a joke?

[RCA Indian Head Test Pattern, Please Stand By, on black and white television screens during the 1950s.]

Last week the subtitle of my post on Allotment #3 was “a real estate problem.” That was intended to be a riff on a joke written by Charlie Hill. A stand-up comedian, Hill (1951-2013) was from Oneida, Wisconsin. The Oneida reservation is twenty-five miles north of Appleton, which is where I’d first watched him on television.

On September 17, 1977, Charlie Hill made his first TV appearance on The Richard Pryor Show and the next year on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Hill would introduce himself:

“My people are from Wisconsin. We used to be from New York. We had a little real estate problem.”

The joke has become such a classic that it’s the title of a fascinating book I read last year. Comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff wrote We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded History of Native Americans & Comedy (Simon & Schuster 2022). The cultural contributions of humor, laughter, even joy displaces the myth of the sad, subdued, stoic, vanishing Indian. Funny social commentary is a powerful form of political resistance. Watch the video clip and chuckle.

If you are looking for a few more laughs I highly recommend reading Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s by Tiffany Midge. It will get you giggling.

Next week I’ll come back to the real estate problem with the three allotments of Red Lake Reservation land on Lake of the Woods.