Rhetorical Repetition & Humor in Midge

     Tiffany Midge’s Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s features a great deal of repetition, whether it be in the form of repetitive themes, subject matter, or jokes. The continual usage of these repeated elements works rhetorically to emphasize their importance; it also helps the reader to understand what portions should be focused on and what should not be. However, the repetition does tend to detract from the humor, likely due to the punchlines becoming expected.

     For example, the joke “How do you say ‘ugly Christmas sweater’ in Lakota?” is used throughout the book, from “Tweets as Assigned Texts for a Native American Studies Course” to “Are You There, Christmas? It’s Me, Carol!” The repetitive nature of the joke works to underline how Christmas is a white colonist idea, and, thus, forcing it on indigenous persons or otherwise trying to add it into indigenous languages is another form of colonization; however, as the joke has been used in the same format twice, it feels tired, like an old joke.

     A similar effect is created in “Fifty Shades of Buckskin,” in which many of the tweets from the first mentioned essay are integrated nearly verbatim into synopses for romance novels. While this works to emphasize her point of racist expectations not meeting reality, the repetition also makes these stories ones that the reader already knows the end of. The humor theory of incongruity states that part of what makes us laugh is expecting one ending and then realizing that we were wrong; repeated punchlines and ideas negate this effect, with unfortunate side-effects, because the reader is then unable to spend the mental energy on realizing why she was wrong in her expectations.

     While Midge’s emphasis on repetition works to further her points about social justice and indigenous rights, it also works to detract from her humor, adding an unfortunate sense of someone just repeating herself (or, perhaps, others) as opposed to providing new and novel ideas that force the reader to re-evaluate her own expectations.