Janelle Niles is creating a legacy in comedy based on camaraderie and care

Janelle Niles is a stand-up comedian from Truro, Nova Scotia and the producer of Got Land?, an all-Indigenous comedy tour. The Got Land? show is an example of what greater solidarity could mean for the culture of comedy in Canada. The stated goal of the show is to “express solidarity with humour” as a way of gaining grassroots control over the sites of cultural production: the venues, shows, institutions and platforms that determine who makes it and who gets missed in comedy. We discuss Janelle’s ability to use humour to cope with some of the most difficult subjects imaginable. Beyond just the joy of making other people laugh, we know that humour can also be a kind of survival strategy. So, COVID-19, we also know, has devastated creative communities, and it has created a level of suffering in communities of colour that should show us, unequivocally, how present and immediate the legacies of systemic oppression are in Canada. Niles talks about her hustle here, which she says is required to fight that system; but the point of solidarity is that the status quo can’t be changed by one person alone. Her ambition is to construct a legacy of comradeship and mutual care, one that is real and formidable enough to fight deeply unfair forms of exclusion. One of the things that Janelle says that I really appreciate here is that “people are not politically aware” in Canada. That’s an important baseline, in a way. It implies having to be sort of pragmatic about communication, and comedy, she says, is an extremely intuitive communicational art. She describes this feeling of having been “born political,” not only because she is Black and Indigenous, but because her experience of racism in Canada has opened her eyes to the scale of racial inequality in this country. A certain kind of racism exists within the culture of comedy in Canada. Niles describes the experience of a Black comedian in Montreal who was told that if there was more than one Black comic on a bill, then the show would be “too ghetto, too ethnic.” As she puts it, this attitude means that, in effect, people of colour are still either the “token” performer on a white-dominated bill, or not included at all. And she wants to “dismantle that.” The watchword here is this notion of “audacity.” Janelle makes connections between how the Idle No More movement, which is ten years old and going strong, provided the grassroots opportunity to “speak the truth” and push to be heard and respected. It reminded First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples in the place currently called Canada that it’s “unfair” to be pushed into a point in the past, to be pressured into invisibility and intimidated out of asserting basic rights. Niles doubles down and says that Got Land? is like “Idle No More with jokes,” it insists on the audacity of BIPOC comedy and the fact of her presence on this land, now. In this context, she talks about trying to be “truthful, transparent and come from a place of love” while working to ensure that she never has to “justify” her existence. She says she is willing to go to difficult places and break down “misconceptions one joke at a time.”