Good Medicine: A Night of Live Native Standup Under the Stars
By Ishmael Ali Khan Elias
If you’ve never had a Good Medicine comedy experience, you’ve been missing out!
The virtual production created in the early days of the pandemic as a way to showcase Native comedians and fundraise for Native communities impacted by COVID-19 is surely becoming a powerhouse in Bay Area comedy.
Good Medicine creator, curator, host, and performer Jackie Keliiaa (Yerington Paiute / Washoe / Native Hawaiian) produced Good Medicine’s first in-person performance in July 2021 at the Cal Shakes Bruns Amphitheater, located on the ancestral, occupied, and unceded lands of the Bay Miwok people and the Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone people. The second program was in the garden area of the Oakland Museum of California under clear skies and a bright, magical moon. The third and most recent show returned to the Bruns Amphitheater on July 16 with another A1 cast of Native comedians, including Brian Bahe (Tohono O’odham / Hopi / Navajo), Monique Moreau (Cree First Nations/Saulteaux), Teresa Choyguha (Tohono O’odham), Earnest David Tsosie, III (Navajo), and performer / host Keliiaa.
My wife and I arrived on the early side to the amphitheater due to my misreading of the flyer, but the mistake allowed us time to enjoy the live music, cafe, and vendor stations in the picnic area. After eating and wondering about for a bit, we took our seats in the center of the Terrace section under the fragrant eucalyptus trees and chatted as we enjoyed the marvelous view of the Orinda hills behind the stage. As the night advanced, other audience members moseyed in, notably Lisjan Ohlone activist Corrina Gould.
Keliiaa opened the show with warmth and energy, surveying the audience to see how many were new to the Good Medicine experience. To my surprise, over half of the audience raised their hands, which is a clear sign the brand is growing and reaching new audience members, Keliiaa said in an e-mail statement after the event. As noted in my interview with Keliiaa in the Winter 2021/22 issue of News from Native California, two of Jackie’s joys as a standup comedian are ad libbing jokes and riffing with the audience. True, those techniques are used by many comedians, but not many do it as seamlessly.
Choyguha of More Than Frybread fame was center stage next, delivering an irreverent set of unfortunate events that had me laughing while thinking that ain’t right. Reminds me of a few aunties I grew up with and being traumatized at family gatherings by conversations that weren’t meant for me to hear.
The flyer for Good Medicine: A Night of Live Native Standup Under the Stars has Marc Yaffee on the lineup, so when Keliiaa introduced Tsosie as the next performer, I thought I had made another flyer reading error. I later learned that Yaffee couldn’t make the show, which was bittersweet because while I enjoy his standup, I had never seen Tsosie’s comedy aside from his role in More than Frybread. The hard part about reviewing a comedy show is resisting the urge to retell jokes. For one, print can sometimes mute the nuance of a joke and, two, I don’t want to spoil the comedians’ recent material. That said, Tsosie’s grab bag—in which he speaks about topics written on folded strips of paper picked from a pouch—is worth mentioning since it’s humorous and the topics are seemingly random. Like Choyguha, his style is not only saying funny things, but “saying things funny.”
The third comedian, Monique Moreau, noted she is both autistic and a pianist—topics which formed the bones of her set. Like the previous comedians, Moreau focused on telling funny stories with jokes sprinkled in, akin to this gem I found in her Twitter feed:
“Autistic teens need to start documenting their parent’s behavior on social media, just saying stuff like, “I love my neurotypical parent but it ruins my day when they do this…” and it’s just a video of their Mom vacuuming.”
Rounding out the event was Brian Bahe, whose sets of late have been about being Native, gay, and “Asian-passing.” One thing I appreciate about Brian’s style is that it holds a surreptitious bite. For example, he’ll tell a humorous PG-Rated story and follow it up with one that flips to the dark side. “I’m no longer terrified of dying during a Grindr hookup,” he said on a recent Comedy Central special. “Because that’s kind of like, ‘he died doing what he loved.’ I’m more terrified of dying picking up a bookshelf from someone that I met on Craigslist. That’s way more embarrassing mostly because there’s nothing on Craigslist worth dying for. I don’t want people to know my final words were, ‘the ad said this was new, but this is clearly gently-used.’”
Kelliiaa said she’s “looking to travel the show” and is currently in talks with a couple theaters in Oregon and New York to bring Good Medicine their way. She added, “Of course, Good Medicine was born in the Bay Area, so we will definitely continue to have shows out here with fresh new lineups.”
Good Medicine: A Night of Live Native Standup Under the Stars was sponsored by the Lesher Foundation and IllumiNative.
