Punchy Lines Beat Pedantic Visuals in ‘Indian Humor’

“Indian Humor”? It sounds like the title of one of those pernicious little joke books popular in the days when whites didn’t even bother to lower their voices before retailing the thigh-slapper about the squaw and the chief.

In fact, the show by that name--at the Fullerton Museum Center through Aug. 11--was assembled by American Indian Contemporary Arts in San Francisco. Curator Sara Bates, a Cherokee from Oklahoma, asked 38 Native American artists to address the topic in any way they chose, with old or new work.

Much humor is culture-specific (you wouldn’t confuse a British joke, say, with a Russian one) and revelatory of a people’s underlying dreams and frustrations.

Catching the drift of Native American humor means having a sense of how a diverse group of people make their individual peace with (or war on) a society that persists in seeing them through a fog of demeaning or sentimental stereotypes.

But humor also tends to result from unexpected juxtapositions and events, making it likely to fall flat as the theme of an art exhibition. It’s one thing to be unexpectedly amused by the premise or appearance of a work of art and quite another to come to a show looking for laughs.

Based on the artists’ feisty and colorful written statements, Native American humor seems to be fueled by an unlikely mixture of wild exaggeration and gentle irony, and is frequently rooted in wry comparisons of the habits of the human and animal worlds.

Unfortunately, the art itself is largely a disappointment. Too often, the art is little more than a pedantic illustration of the message. Too many pieces sink under the dead weight of bland, dated styles and relentless cuteness.

As far as “humor” is concerned, blunt sarcasm tends to substitute for irony. In his clumsily written catalog essay, Paul Chaat Smith claims that because Indians have little opportunity to share their humor with the outside world, some of the artists “overcompensate and try to make their work easy to understand.”

This viewer can’t help but think that better artists could bridge this gap. The pat moralism of much of this work seems more a product of inbred university art departments (nearly half the show’s artists hold master’s degrees) than of cultural barriers.

In any case, visual one-liners tend to stand out when the subject is humor on demand. Peter Jones delivers the goods with “Buenos Dias Juan Valdez Indian Brand Series Part II,” a wryly down-to-earth reworking of the romanticized coffee-logo figure as an armed and muffled guerrilla.

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Few artists in the show demonstrate Larry McNeil’s ability to use contemporary art strategies to convey subtleties of Native American wit to an outsider audience.

In his photo-and-text piece, “Fly, Don’t Walk,” McNeil startles the viewer into glimpsing what it is like to balance an inborn awareness of natural harmony with signals from another culture steeped in a baffling sense of decorum and grace.

McNeil, a member of the Tlingit and Nisga’a tribes, contrasts a photograph of a bird flying across an expanse of white wall on a street with the symbols he encounters as a pedestrian (an electronic sign with the image of a white man).

“Not wanting to offend anyone,” he writes, “I did my best imitation of a white man walking and crossed the street.”

McNeil’s deadpan humor animates a 1980 photograph of himself lounging near an old car outside a building in New Mexico that advertises itself as the “most interesting spot . . . where real Indians trade.”

At that moment, he writes, “I felt at one with the world, like a salmon going upstream to do his business, like a bad monkey with a roomful of ripe bananas.”

Coyotes, the wily male tricksters of Native American lore, figure in a number of pieces, most metaphorically in Duane Slick’s series of double-sided “Coyote Television Bookpieces” that allude to the double-edged nature of media imagery of Native Americans.

A brash, counterculture spirit flavors several of the peppier works. Gail Tremblay incorporates a roach joke into her figurative sculptural piece. A “roach” is also a term for a porcupine hair headdress; the semantic confusion mirrors Native Americans’ all-too-common experience of being misunderstood by the outside world.

Marcus Amerman devises a rave-worthy “Medicine Man’s Headpiece” out of feathers and a mirror: an acceptance of youth culture’s widespread embrace of ritual (however simplified and “inauthentic”) along with technology.

Technology informs Sharol Graves’ droll serigraphs, which play with the similarities between computer circuitry design and the geometric Native American patterns in traditional crafts. In “Indian Circuit,” Graves incorporates images of beaded moccasins into the design, suggesting a punning connection between circuitry and an itinerant ethnic dancer’s experience of “being on the circuit.”

Amid the gently good-humored pieces that make up most of this show, Ernie Pepion’s substitution of disposable diapers (at least one bears signs of use) for the buffalo hide in a traditional infant’s “cradle board” seems particularly outrageous--and outraged. With such titles as “Man Infest Dysentery” and “Time for a Change,” these blunt one-liners unambiguously raise issues of extinction and waste in contemporary society.

But in the end, the most memorable and wryly amusing aspects of this show are the anecdotal writings accompanying the art. Who could forget that someone once walked up to Kay Walkingstick, a Cherokee and Winnebago, and said, “You’re an Indian? I thought you were a Jewish girl from Queens who changed her name.”

* “Indian Humor,” through Aug. 11 at the Fullerton Museum Center, 301 N. Pomona Ave. Hours: Noon-4 p.m., Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday; noon-8 p.m. Thursday. Admission $3 adults, $2 students, free for children under 12. (714) 738-6545.