“LOL, let’s just put that all together!”

For most people, tackling the embodied consequences of settler colonialism, racism, and homophobia would be at odds with cracking self-deprecating jokes and coming up with low brow play on words revolving too frequently around male genitalia. Originally from the Viejas reservation in what is today San Diego, California, Kumeyaay poet, screenwriter, and podcaster Tommy Pico has made of that unlikely combination his signature style.[1] Perhaps because “in the popular mind, serious poetry has been equated with solemnity, humorlessness, and intellectual difficulty” (Wallace 1984, 4), while still noting it, scholars tend to place Pico’s comicality in a second tier of relevance.[2] In line with Joseph L. Coulombe, who has suggested that comedy is perfect “to reveal injustice, protect self-esteem, heal wounds, and create bonds” (2010, 94), I claim that humor is not ancillary to Pico’s agenda, but essential to its social potential. To show this, I will first need to detour and revise the widespread categorization of Pico as an epic poet, suggesting his work may fit better within the always contested confessional mode. Namely, what Anne Hartman has dubbed the “counter-confessional,” which comprises poets like Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg. This perhaps controversial relocation will allow me to place Pico among other “comedians of the spirit” (Bloom 2004, 17) and claim his humor as the best engaging strategy in his neo-confessionalism attuned to the age of social media. [1] Pico has written many episodes of the acclaimed HBO series Reservation Dogs and is the co-host of the very popular podcast Food for Thot with Denne Michele Norris, Joseph Osmundson, and Fran Tirado. [2] An important exception being Kyle Bladow. Perhaps due to the medium, online reviewer on magazines and blogs do emphasize humor, too. For example, although Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is careful to clarify it would be wrong to claim of Pico that “his book-length poems are just one long joke” (2020), he shares my position regarding the centrality of humor in the poet’s work, and even a similar analysis to the one I will develop in this paper.