Funny As by Paul Horan

Author:Paul Horan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2019-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

THE TRUE SKILL OF BILLY T. JAMES WAS HE NEVER, NEVER UTTERED A PROFANITY. HE NEVER, NEVER CROSSED THE LINE, EVER.

– Mike King

An outtake from a Billy T. publicity photo session, mid-1980s.

The character Sambo was a parody of the Rambo films.

At its peak, 1.5 million kiwis tuned in to watch The Billy T James Show, half New Zealand’s population at the time.

McLeod, like many, experienced Pākehā guilt over James’s comedy: ‘I feel very uncomfortable about humour that I perceive to have a racist connotation, and I know this sounds ridiculous. He was a Māori man. He was parodying a certain type of Māori man, but at the same time, I’m a white audience. What am I doing with this? It’s not as if we had a balance in the world of Māori brain surgeons that we were reading about every day.’17

Anglican church leader Hone Kaa articulated the conflicted feelings produced by James’s comedy in a 2002 documentary on Māori humour, The Last Laugh, when he explained that Māori enjoyed watching James on their own but felt awkward in mixed company, as though ‘you were being laughed at’.18 While James was understandably central, the documentary went further and showed how contemporary forms of Māori comedy had deep roots. Morrison and comedian Pio Terei both suggested that humour and mockery are ingrained in Māori oral tradition and are used to put people in their place on the marae. Kaa referred back to the mythical figure of the Māori trickster god Māui: ‘We all descend from that original prankster.’19 Even Winston Peters put much of his political career in a new light when he explained the difference between Pākehā and Māori comedy: ‘They say with the English things can be serious but it’s never hopeless. With Māori things can be hopeless but they’re never serious.’20 Humour performs different roles depending on whether you are in the majority or the minority, as linguists Janet Holmes and Jennifer Hay found in their study of humour as an ethnic marker. Māori are more likely to use humour to define boundaries between themselves and others, and reinforce similarities among themselves, than Pākehā.21

Māori were not the only ethnic group to be targeted by James’s comedy. Far from it. The Billy T James Show also sent up Americans, the Irish, the French, the Japanese, Australians and any other nationality with a recognisable accent. One of James’s popular live routines involved him demonstrating how he learned to speak Japanese, which simply involved combining three noises: the sound of shivering, the sound of constipation and the sound of amnesia. It was a crass joke made funny by James’s uncanny impersonation of Japanese actor Frankie Sakai from then-current TV series Shogun; James was an unusually good mimic. But this act raises questions as well. When a Māori comedian performed that material in a cabaret setting before a Pākehā audience on The Billy T James Show, it was hard not to feel a little uneasy. Were we laughing with the Japanese or at them? As far as we could tell, the Japanese weren’t laughing.

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