"I Wonder Which of You is Real": The Indigenous Confidence Man in John Kneubuhl's "The Night of the Two-Legged Buffalo"

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dc.creatorOrr, Stanley
dc.date.accessioned2023-10-04T20:13:36Z
dc.date.available2023-10-04T20:13:36Z
dc.date.copyright2021
dc.date.issued2021-11-02
dc.description.abstractIn response to Judith Yaross Lee’s introduction of a framework designed to probe the relationship between empire and American humor, this article analyzes John Kneubuhl’s “The Night of the Two-Legged Buffalo,” a 1966 episode of The Wild Wild West (1965-69). Kneubuhl (1920-92) was a Samoan American playwright who wrote for theater, television, and film. Like Mark Twain, he demonstrated a lifelong interest in the trope of the confidence man. In “The Night of the Two-Legged Buffalo” he depicts protagonists and antagonists alike in the US borderlands as con artists contending for power. While agents Jim West and Artemus Gordon emerge as cultural impersonators who serve the ideology of Manifest Destiny, the Prince of the South Sea Coral Islands, a Polynesian aristocrat, deploys American hegemony in Oceania. Kneubuhl draws on conventions of the fale aitu, a Samoan theatrical genre, as well as his association with Sam Amalu, a Native Hawaiian humorist and con man known for his elaborate pranks and swindles. As a site of contest between what Lee terms “neocolonial hybridity” and “postcolonial discontinuity,” “The Night of the Two-Legged Buffalo” exemplifies Kneubuhl’s unique trickster aesthetics.
dc.formatArticle
dc.format.extent18 pages
dc.identifier.citationOrr, S. (2021). “I Wonder Which of You is Real”: The Indigenous Confidence Man in John Kneubuhl’s “The Night of the Two-Legged Buffalo.” <em>Studies in American Humor</em>, 7(2), 329–346. https://doi.org/10.5325/studamerhumor.7.2.0329
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10790/42710
dc.languageeng
dc.subjectconfidence man
dc.subjecthumor
dc.subjectimperialism
dc.subjectJohn Kneubuhl
dc.subjectOceania and the Pacific
dc.subjectpostcolonialism
dc.subjectSam Amalu
dc.subjecttelevision
dc.subjecttricksters
dc.subjectThe Wild Wild West
dc.title"I Wonder Which of You is Real": The Indigenous Confidence Man in John Kneubuhl's "The Night of the Two-Legged Buffalo"
dcterms.typeText

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