YOU'VE GOTTA LAUGH

That great Māori writer, Mark Twain, once wrote, “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.”

On a recent flight to Kerikeri, my seat mate was a Ngāpuhi woman coming home from Perth for time with whānau, particularly the mokopuna. She’d been away for a year, and had at least two new descendants to meet for the first time. Like many grandparents who live on either side of Te Moana Tāpokapoka a Tāwhaki, she relies heavily on the internet to keep in touch with her mokopuna.

As the Māori diaspora continues, one of its saddest and yet most appreciated outcomes is that it’s given rise to the facebook whānau. It’s a phenomenon that social commentators and historians will have a field day with in the future. But here, in the present, it’s just about whānau doing what we must to communicate our love and longing for home, and for each other.

And that has given rise to an emerging vocabulary of facebookisms; new words for old meanings, as well as old words with new spellings and meanings. These, in turn, have given rise to a new wave of that unique brand of Māori humour; the kind that keeps us sane in the face of insanity.

The hallmarks of a really good facebookism are that it’s got to make you laugh, it has to be slightly off the mark and yet be oddly appropriate.

A six year old in Perth to her recuperating nanna, “We love you nanna. No more harder tacks ay.” A newly politicised youth in Melbourne commenting on Osama bin Laden’s death, “It’s disgusting to see americans celebrating OBL’s death, nothing but proper gander!” A middle-aged man describing the climate in Brisbane to his mum in Auckland, “Rain rain rain yet stinkin hot, over 30 degrease.” A young father on white Australian attitudes to Aboriginals, “They’re so pignorant.”

You’ve gotta laugh ay. While more of our whānau succeed in Ozzie rather than here at home, we get to stare at and lovingly trace their faces on computer screens in a parody of human touch. And we get to watch homesteads fall into disrepair, marae struggle to manāki manuhiri, taumata manned by boys, and young girls conduct the karanga. But, you’ve gotta laugh.

When those who have been privileged by our dispossession and marginalisation accuse us of being privileged and lazy, you’ve gotta laugh. Especially when they take it upon themselve to tell us our history based on how someone from another culture saw or sees it. Can you imagine if we rewrote their hakapapa and history the way they do ours? It’s too funny for words, so best just laugh.

Back to that rangatira Mark Twain. “The human race,” he wrote, “ has only one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.” I struggle with that. I love laughing, but my problem is that I stopped seeing the pignorant proper gander of degreased racists giving themselves harder tacks as funny a long time ago.

Still, you’ve gotta laugh ay. Because if you don’t ...