Will Rogers’s Indian Humor

Abstract

By the time of his death in 1935, political humorist Will Rogers had become one of the most famous personalities in the United States. Through his syndicated weekly articles and daily telegrams, films, and radio broadcasts, Rogers reached an estimated audience of forty million. Because of his deft use of the venues of mass enter tainment?from the vaudeville stage to Hollywood?and the con sequent mainstreaming of his act, it may be easy to pass over the side of Rogers that was not so mainstream: born in 1879 in Indian Territory, Rogers was a member of the Cherokee Nation for the first twenty years of his life. He became a naturalized American citizen after the 1898 Curtis Act brought the disbanding of tribal govern ment and the allotment of land in severalty to the Five Tribes. Billed as a cowboy from Oklahoma and as a self-made diplomat to the president, nominated for the presidency because of the broad appeal of his home-spun humor and common Rogers's commercially crafted all-American public identity is a simplification of a complex personal and national history. Rogers's humor has been discussed as the American-grown cracker-barrel humor originating with Benjamin Franklins Poor Richard. Horse sense, as Walter Blair wrote in 1942, is that good, sound, practical that Will Rogers shares with Franklin, Josh Billings, Davy Crockett, and an assortment of other American humorists (vi). While Blair sees horse sense as peculiar to North America, he does not attribute any part of Rogers s humor to the part-Cherokee identity Rogers claimed as his own. This failure to