Humor as a Weapon in Contemporary Canadian Theatre: A Study of Selected Plays by Tomson Highway
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although many critics evaluate Native humor as a mirror reflecting Native traditions or marking it as always subversive, Native writers frequently use humor to deal with sensitive social tensions and paradoxes. The writers may oscillate between confirming and criticizing divisive beliefs, classifications, and identities became of humor's regulating and disordering effects on their writings. This paper investigates Native humor as a social practice developed out of cultural and historical circumstances that enable Native people to confront change while retaining a feeling of consistency and flexibility. In Native writings, originality, identity, and social concerns are frequently brought up in humorous behaviors. Humor challenges narrow conceptions of "Naiveness" while enabling Native people to keep a sense of self. For instance, "the white man" satires enable writers to interact with and challenge the dominant society. The idea of authentic identity is both undermined and supported by humorous images of racial and ethnic hybridity. The Rez Sisters, first performed by Native Earth Performing Arts in Toronto in 1986, and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, first presented at Theatre Pass Muraille in Toronto in 1989, marked the theatrical debuts of Canadian Native playwright Tomson Highway on both the domestic and international stages. At the time, both pieces received overwhelmingly positive reviews, making Highway the focus of the Canadian theatre community. Both plays received the Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award, given to Canadian plays performed professionally in the Toronto region, as well as the Dora Mavor Moore Award for an Outstanding New Play (1988–1989).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.041 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".