Charlie Hill was the first Native stand-up comedian ever to perform on national television, making his network television debut on The Richard Pryor Show in 1977. He then went on to become the first Native comedian to perform on The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson, but just how did a home-grown stand-up from the Oneida Nation come to take Hollywood by storm? Hill's origin story involves good friends, raunchy props, and some really great punchlines. Read on to learn more.
Charlie Hill stood in line behind a tall man with an orange beard. Opened a few years earlier, in May 1972, the Comedy Store had quickly become a scouting ground for major network television shows. Stand-up hopefuls lined up along Sunset Boulevard in the late afternoon, waiting to audition for Comedy Store matriarch Mitzi Shore. While the amateurs loitered, they got to know one another.
The Comedy StoreMatriarch Mitzi Shore at The Comedy Store
“Hey, man,” Charlie said to the man with the beard. “Charlie—from Oneida, Wisconsin.”
“Hey. Dave from Indianapolis.”
They chatted about their mutual Tonight Show dreams and became fast friends. Hill rode shotgun as Dave drove them around in a dented red truck, searching for any open mic they could find.
“Letterman used to pick me up in this pickup truck and we’d go to all these gigs,” said Hill. “I’d get on at two o’clock [in the morning] and he’d get on at two-fifteen. He’d always say, ‘What are we doing this for?’”
But the reason was obvious. The more shows you did, the better you got. They gained experience working for free, but Letterman was growing short on gas money, and Hill could no longer afford groceries.
“I never knew true poverty until I became a comedian,” said Hill. “There were times when I wouldn’t have anything.”
Born in Detroit on July 6, 1951, Charlie Hill grew up watching a steady stream of sitcoms, variety shows, cartoons, and old movies on local television channels WWJ and WXYZ. When Charlie was playing outside, he re-created the characters he loved.
“He’d find a black shirt and a navy hat and role-play Popeye,” says Norbert Jr., Hill’s brother. “He’d pretend to be Davy Crockett and wear a coonskin hat when it was ninety-five degrees outside.” He even went so far as to play the Lone Ranger, forcing his younger brother, Rick, into the menial role of Tonto, the Native American sidekick.
“I didn’t realize until later what kind of brainwashing was being done to us,” said Hill. “The irony of Indian kids playing cowboys and Indians.”’
Charlie Hill was eleven years old when his father moved the family from Detroit back to Oneida, Wisconsin, where Norbert Hill Sr. immersed himself in tribal politics.
I never knew true poverty until I became a comedian. There were times when I wouldn’t have anything.“He had grown up watching his mother, a doctor, doing community health work in Oneida, so he decided to move us all back so that he could get involved,” says Norbert Jr. “He ran for tribal council and became chairman. He grew up on the reservation and had been in the Navy—so he knew how to navigate both worlds, socially and politically. But we went from a middle-class existence in Detroit to an existence of no running water and no central heat in Oneida.”
Norbert Sr. was the vice chairman of the Oneida Nation and led the Great Lakes Inter-Tribal Council. He had a reputation for being amusing, although his wife stole his best jokes.
“He would tell jokes and my mom would just stare at him,” said Charlie Hill. “And then when my mom would be around a gathering of family people, she’d repeat the joke—and get a big laugh with it.”
They gathered around the television each weekend and watched comedy as a family.
Michael Ochs ArchivesJackie Gleason on stage during rehearsal of the "The Jackie Gleason Show"
“As a kid, on Saturdays, after all the work was done, we would go up the hill to the Oneida Mission because they had showers,” said Charlie. “You’d pay the guy a quarter and we’d take a shower and we had to stand in the water of the previous family. But we were glad to have it. And we’d come home and my mom would make chili or something and we would watch Jackie Gleason. That’s when it kind of set in. . . . I loved watching Jackie Gleason. I’d sit on my dad’s lap. I couldn’t wait for Saturday night. When I got a little older, I’d stand behind the door late at night because I couldn’t stay up and my mom would be watching Jack Paar. . . . I thought, ‘How do I get in there? How do I learn how to do that? How do I get in that box?’”
Charlie Hill saw all the sitcom stereotypes growing up, and he watched as his father yelled at the screen, “Those aren’t Indians! Look how dumb they are! Indians—they’re not like this!” As he entered his adolescence, Hill was openly critical of what he saw on TV, and not just stereotypes. He became a discerning critic of comedy.
“I would watch this comedy team called Allen and Rossi, a fat, dumpy Jewish guy and a handsome Italian singer,” Hill said. “Even when I was eleven years old, I thought, ‘These guys are awful. They suck! They’re so bad.’ They made me so angry.”
But if Allen and Rossi could land on The Ed Sullivan Show, then perhaps, Hill thought, there was a chance for the kid from Oneida.
“I wanted to be a comedian,” he said. “It was like a secret wish.”
Getty ImagesDick Gregory performing on stage, circa 1960-1970
It was a revelation for Hill when he saw Dick Gregory on an episode of Jack Paar’s Tonight Show in 1961. Gregory was a political comedian and an African American activist. He participated in civil rights marches and joked about lunch counter sit-ins, Bull Connor, and the Ku Klux Klan. And to Hill’s surprise, he delivered a line about Native Americans on The Tonight Show:
“About three months ago I worked up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and everybody told me, ‘Greg, you’ll love the state of Minnesota. We have terrific civil rights laws. And in this state you’d never know you’re Negro.’ That’s true—because they’re too busy picking on the Indians. If the Indians ever pack their bags and leave the state of Minnesota, I’ll be getting on the next train out of there.”
Hill watched the performance through a crack in his bedroom door, and it convinced him to do stand-up. He whispered quietly to himself, “I’m going to go for it. I’m going to find a way. I’m going to learn how to do it.”
Hill arrived in Los Angeles at the end of 1974. Perusing the entertainment section of the Los Angeles Times, Hill came across an advertisement for the Garden Theater Festival, a three-day event in East Hollywood’s Barnsdall Park featuring experimental rock bands, counterculture street mimes, and young comedians. He stretched the truth and told the person on the other end of the line that he was a comedian who had just returned from a European tour. Sight unseen, he was granted ten minutes on the outdoor stage. Hill went onstage at 10 p.m., but the audience thought he was a roadie fiddling with the mic stand
“I figured I’d just get up there and talk,” he recalled. “But I found out right away why they call it an act. It was frightening—staring at the microphone and seeing all those strange people drinking and staring at me.”
Nobody laughed, and he bombed hard.
Deflated but not defeated, he found a number of open mics in the San Fernando Valley, including Tynes in Studio City, mainly patronized by jazz musicians, and the Palomino Club in North Hollywood, mainly patronized by country singers. Argus Hamilton was one of his open-mic contemporaries.
Do you just do Native material?“Charlie worked the Palomino Club talent night when he first started, and it was a rowdy cowboy crowd,” says Hamilton. “They got a big kick out of him because it was literally cowboys and Indians.”
But neither of those open mics were the place Hamilton and Hill were aiming for. When Hill finally secured an audition at the Comedy Store, he was surprised to find Mitzi Shore’s office decorated with Green Bay Packers memorabilia. Shore was delighted to learn that the handsome young man was from an area just down the highway from the house where she grew up. They spent an hour talking about Oneida and University of Wisconsin, which they’d both attended. Completely charmed without even seeing his material, she gave him plenty of stage time and full creative freedom.
Getty ImagesShore was a loving mother to her band of comedians, but also to her son, Pauly, pictured here with her at The Comedy Store.
“We hit it off right from there,” said Hill. “When I started playing some clubs, a lot of people were offended by my point of view. They didn’t want to hear it. ‘Do you just do Native material?’ But Mitzi always let me do whatever I wanted onstage.”
Shore was a loving mother to her collection of stand-up ne’er-dowells, and the comedians bonded as they crammed the back hallway before and after their sets.
“We were running in a posse of young comedians that all hung out together, partied together, wrote jokes together, did everything together,” says Argus Hamilton. “We were—if you will pardon the expression—a tribe of comedians. That tribe included Ollie Joe Prater, a tremendous mountain-man type of comic; Vic Dunlop, a big, round, mustachioed comic with a tremendously funny face; Dave Tyree, an African American comic fresh out of Vietnam; Michael Keaton; and Robin Williams. It was essentially a pledge class, the Comedy Store pledge class of 1976. We’d go to Vic Dunlop’s house off of Melrose Avenue and sit in his living room and get high. We would sit around that coffee table, smoking pot, writing jokes together. It was a very creative time. There was about a dozen of us. And Charlie Hill, this beautiful Native American man, handsome by every definition, was the most welcoming of all.”
When you do stand-up comedy in front of a Native crowd, you are performing in front of royalty.Occasionally Hill ditched his pot-smoking posse to join Buffy Sainte-Marie on the road. A contemporary of Joni Mitchell with an unapologetic Native point of view, Sainte-Marie enjoyed crossover success as a socially conscious folk-pop hybrid. Hill said, “I met her at the [Native Friendship Center in downtown Los Angeles] in 1975. She took to me right away. She said, ‘Well, give me a tape of what you’re doing.’ So I sent it to her, and a week later she called me up and she talked to me for two hours. . . . Then she came back to L.A. and I got to open for her.”
Hill was extremely green, with barely ten minutes of material, but Sainte-Marie knew that the handsome, affable goofball would go over big with her audience—most of whom had never even heard of a Native comedian.
Getty ImagesBuffy Sainte-Marie performing circa 1975
“It was a real easy decision,” she says. “I liked him and I thought the audience would love him—and they did. Here was a comedian with whom they could identify. Native audiences loved him, and he loved them right back. Hill always said, ‘When you do stand-up comedy in front of a Native crowd, you are performing in front of royalty.’”
During their long commutes from gig to gig, Charlie and Buffy bonded on the road. Sainte-Marie regaled Hill with stories of the fundraisers she had done in the 1960s with Stokely Carmichael, Muhammad Ali, Flip Wilson, and Charlie’s hero, Dick Gregory.
“We had a mutual liking of each other’s material and observations,” says Sainte-Marie. “We also shared similar perspectives in being outsiders in show business, a foot in each of two canoes: grassroots/urban life and show-biz/traveling life. When we’d hang out, we would share our experiences about being the only Indian on the bill and sometimes the only Indian in the room.”
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Charlie and Buffy played fundraisers, rallies, and powwows together, but the conditions were not particularly conducive to stand-up. Charlie’s brother Norbert Jr. recalls, “Some Indian gathering would have him come to a reservation where there was no microphone and no marketing. He would explain to them afterward, ‘You have to have a microphone! You have to have chairs!’ Stand-up comedy was all new in Indian Country.”
Playing reservations, friendship centers, and community events, Charlie Hill slowly shed the crutch of jokebook material and replaced it with an earnest, personal point of view.
“Dick Gregory did a lot of material on civil rights and Black issues,” said Hill. “He also talked about experiences we have in common. That’s what I’m doing from a Native American viewpoint to defuse that traditional John Wayne mentality.”
Hill returned to the Comedy Store in early 1976 and walked into the greenroom to scan the sheet of paper taped on the wall to see what time he was going on. Scrawled in jiffy marker, the rundown said:
8:30 Argus Hamilton
8:45 Howie Mandel
9:00 Mike Binder
9:15 Barry Diamond
9:30 Ronny Kenney
9:50 Jeff Altman
10:10 Jimmie Walker
10:30 Larry David
10:50 Allan Stephan
11:10 Jimmy Brogan
11:30 Jay Leno
11:50 Joe Restivo
12:10 Charlie Hill
12:30 Paul Mooney
Hill took to the stage with the hand drum his father had gifted him before he left Wisconsin. He used it to re-create the cliché sound heard in hundreds of western movies, a tom-tom rhythm that went: dumdum-DUM-dum, dum-dum-DUM-dum, dum-dum-DUM-dum. Hill looked out to the audience and asked in rhythm, “Hi-how-are-ya? Hi-how-are-ya? Hi-how-are-ya?” Hill then scanned the crowd and pointed at a college student: “How-high-are-ya? How-high-are-ya? How-high-are-ya?”
The white man this. The white man that. I’m wondering—who is this guy?Hill asked the audience to imagine what it would be like if the world’s most famous comedians were Native American. As examples he presented Rodney Dangerfoot (“I tell ya, American Indians get no respect”), Henny Youngblood (“Take my land—please!”), and a Native version of the Three Stooges: Geroni-Larry, Geroni-Curly, and Geroni-Moe.
“He’d do all these ‘I get no respect’ jokes, one line after another, and have the crowd on the floor,” says Argus Hamilton. “Then he would break into his normal routine, complaining about sports teams like the Cleveland Indians, wondering why there were no teams named the Kansas City Caucasians.”
Hill joked about his activist friends who ranted against the white man.
“When you say ‘white man,’ it’s always singular. The white man this. The white man that. I’m wondering—who is this guy? Because he’s screwing it up for everybody.”
Sometimes Hill walked onstage carrying a picture frame concealed by a blanket. It was a visual gag based on an old street joke.
“He’d lay the picture down on a chair and then go into his Rodney Dangerfoot routine,” says Hamilton. “At the end of his act he walked over and revealed this thing. It was a big four-by-three painting of a meadow, this pastoral landscape. It showed a cow with a halo over its head. On a hillside were fifty Native American men having sex with fifty elderly white ladies.”
As the crowd looked up in bewilderment, Hill said, “I call this painting Custer’s Last Words: ‘Holy cow—look at all those motherfucking Indians.’”
The Comedy Store had three locations in the late 1970s: a flagship location on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, a club in the Westwood area of Los Angeles, and one in San Diego’s La Jolla district. Argus Hamilton says the Westwood room was one of the best places to perform: “Mitzi sent us to Westwood to develop, and in Charlie Hill, she saw a superstar. Charlie played Westwood every single night—and the laughter just bounced off the walls.”
Getty ImagesRichard Pryor performing at The Comedy Store club, on Sunset Boulevard
Hill would open his set by counting the heads of people in the audience to the tune of “Ten Little Indians”: “One little, two little, three little whiteys . . .” He went over big in La Jolla as well. His fellow comic Allan Stephan says, “Charlie killed a lot of places, but down there in La Jolla he killed-killed.”
Westwood and La Jolla had superior acoustics, but it was the flagship location on the Sunset Strip that Richard Pryor used as his workout room. Whenever he was developing new material, getting ready for a Tonight Show appearance, or prepping for a stand-up special, Pryor dropped by. Hill was onstage one night when Pryor walked in. Pryor loved the way Hill roasted the white people in the crowd. He ran up to Charlie afterward and dragged him into the parking lot to smoke a joint. Pryor told him, “We have to get together, motherfucker! You talk to these white people like they’re dogs!”
Hill said Pryor had “an incredible respect for Indian people.” He went on to say, “Every time I saw him he had time for me. He took me to the movies and he took me to his house. He asked, ‘You ever been on TV?’ I said, ‘No, I’m just starting out.’ He said, ‘I’ll get you on.’”
Comedian Paul Mooney was in the process of casting The Richard Pryor Show, a new sketch comedy program for NBC. For Mooney, getting a rise out of his audience was just as good as getting a laugh. He was the comedian as provocateur. For The Richard Pryor Show he wanted a cast of comedians who could do the same. He brought in the cocky Sandra Bernhard, the manic Robin Williams, and the pre–Venus Flytrap stylings of Tim Reid, although none of them did stand-up on the program. The Richard Pryor Show was strictly sketch comedy—with one notable exception.
“Charlie Hill, the 26-year-old Oneida native, now living in Los Angeles, will be appearing on . . . The Richard Pryor Show next Tuesday,” reported the Green Bay Press-Gazette. “It’s the biggest and most exciting step in the budding comedian’s career.”
NBC//Getty Images
Mitzi Shore left the Comedy Store for the afternoon to attend a taping at the NBC facility in Burbank. She was sitting in the front row with Argus Hamilton to witness a breakthrough in Native American representation. Charlie Hill’s dream was realized on October 20, 1977, when he had his network television debut on The Richard Pryor Show.
“I was twenty-six years old and I was thrilled,” said Hill. “I couldn’t believe it.”
Richard Pryor and Paul Mooney had hired him to perform in sketches like the rest of the cast, but when Hill scanned the script, he found the material insulting.
“They wanted me to be in a sketch . . . called ‘White for a Day,’ and it was real demeaning. I didn’t want to do it. I said, ‘I can’t do this sketch, this is too racist.’”
Pryor nodded.
“Okay, well, how about I give you five minutes and you just do whatever you want?”
Hill wanted to do stand-up. The art department worked overtime to create an incongruous “Indian backdrop” that bore no relation to Oneida.
I can’t do this sketch, this is too racist.Hill said, “They had the scenery set up like it was out in the desert, a big rock there and everything. They wanted Richard to come out dressed like Custer and he’d fall down with these arrows in his back. I thought that was real stupid, and so did Richard. He refused to do it, but they already had the scenery out there, so he just brought me on.”
Pryor delivered his introduction in a hushed tone: “I’d like to introduce now a new talent on the show. He’s an Indian brother. Iroquois Nation. Mr. Charlie Hill—please welcome.”
Hill took to the stage in a red shirt and blue jeans, long black hair down to his shoulders, a snappy-looking kerchief tied around his neck:
Hi-how-are-ya, hi-how-are-ya, hi-how-are-ya, hi-how-are-ya? I usually have problems doing my act, you know, ’cause I know a lot of you white people have never seen an Indian do stand-up comedy before. Like, for so long you probably thought that Indians never had a sense of humor.
[pause]
We never thought you were too funny either.
[laughter and applause]
[Hill points]
There’s people back there putting their chairs in a circle.
[laughter]
My name is Charlie Hill. Sekoli. I’m Oneida. I’m from Wisconsin—it’s part of the Iroquois Nation. My people are from Wisconsin. We used to be from New York. We had a little real estate problem.
Mitzi Shore beamed with pride.
“I was sitting right next to Mitzi, and it meant so much to Charlie that she was there,” says Argus Hamilton. “We were right in the front row. It was his first time on national television, and he just destroyed. We were all so happy for him, and he cried afterward. Mitzi was so proud of him.”
More than fifteen million viewers watched Charlie Hill’s stand-up debut, and he was suddenly in demand. He was asked to play white comedy clubs, mainstream talk shows, Indigenous fundraisers, and Native gatherings.
“It was almost like talking two different languages when you’d play to each crowd,” said Hill. “I learned how to do it in both worlds.”
From there Charlie Hill appeared on The Mike Douglas Show, sharing the panel with actor Elliott Gould. Charlie’s brother Norbert Jr. was in Boulder, Colorado, adjusting the rabbit ears on his twenty-eight-inch television set, trying to improve the reception. Mike Douglas kidded with the comedian, “Charlie, I bet when you were a kid you played a lot of cowboys and Indians.”
The program’s producer, Roger Ailes, was caught off guard by Hill’s response.
“It has never been cowboys and Indians,” he replied. “That’s a myth. It has always been government and Indians. When I was a child, my father took me by the hand and said, ‘Charlie, my boy, someday . . . none of this will be yours.’ No, we never played cowboys and Indians. But we did play Nazis and Jews. The rules are the same.”
It was almost like talking two different languages when you’d play to each crowd.Hill appeared on The Mike Douglas Show and The Merv Griffin Show several times. The daytime talk show circuit was like a farm league for those working their way up to The Tonight Show, and Hill found himself sharing panels with Anthony Quinn, Mel Tormé, Buddy Rich, William Shatner, Julia Child, Gavin MacLeod, Dr. Joyce Brothers, Eartha Kitt, Mickey Rooney, and Milton Berle. TV critic Jack O’Brian wrote, “Charlie Hill, the Indian comic with Merv Griffin, was a most original clown with bitingly fresh, cheerfully impudent material about an essentially solemn condition: the plight of the Indian over the centuries of broken treaties, bigotry, rejection, suffering, and worse.”
Three years after arriving in Hollywood, he had firmly established himself. The tours with Buffy Sainte-Marie, the nights at the Comedy Store, the honky-tonks in the San Fernando Valley—all of it led up to his big moment: his debut as the first Native American comedian in Tonight Show history.
NBC
Charlie showed up on the soundstage wearing a silk western shirt, blue jeans, and a large white belt buckle. He paced nervously in the greenroom and exchanged pleasantries with the musical guest, Mel Tillis. Hill had come a long way. In a few minutes, Johnny Carson would be introducing him. It was a monumental moment not only for Charlie Hill but for Native Americans everywhere.
“We used to be from New York. . . . We had a little real estate problem.”
The audience loved it, and Johnny Carson could be heard cackling off-camera.
Hill tugged at his collar and muttered in a Rodney Dangerfield voice, “I tell ya—Indians get no respect.” He went into Henny Youngblood: “Take my land—please.” When Hill finished, Carson flashed an okay sign, chuckling, “Take my land— please. We’ll be [laughing] . . . we’ll be right back.”
When Charlie returned to the greenroom, he found a bouquet of roses and a card:
“You did great, kid. Love, Robin Williams.”
“After Charlie appeared on Johnny Carson, Indians felt proud,” says Norbert Hill Jr. “They stood a little taller. There was this feeling: ‘He’s one of us.’”
When Charlie Hill lined up with the other comedians outside the Comedy Store for the first time, it was hard to tell who among them would emerge triumphant and who would fall by the wayside. Some thought the cleverly crafted jokes of Ed Bluestone would make him a household name, while others dismissed the affable stand-up Michael Keaton. The comic with the most clout was Jimmie Walker, who, thanks to his sitcom Good Times, could throw an occasional bone to less fortunate comics like David Letterman.
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But by the mid-1980s, nobody knew Ed Bluestone, Michael Keaton was a major movie star, and David Letterman was throwing the occasional bone to Jimmie Walker.
Letterman was aware of his good fortune, and he frequently booked old Comedy Store friends to keep them afloat. Letterman was loyal—something for which Charlie Hill would always be grateful.
“My next guest is a comedian who will be appearing December twenty-first at the state penitentiary in Stillwater, Minnesota,” Letterman told his television audience on December 9, 1985. “There may still be a few seats available. Please welcome—Charlie Hill.”
Hill sauntered across the stage, grabbed the microphone, and threw the mic stand to the ground. He went into a mix of new and old material:
“My name is Charlie Hill—I’m an Oneida Indian. We’re originally from here in New York. Now we’re from Wisconsin. Had a little real estate problem. . . . The thing I didn’t like about school was the history books. Y’know, I always thought they were one-sided. . . History books called us vanishing Americans. But we’re still around. When was the last time you saw a Pilgrim?”
Adapted from WE HAD A LITTLE REAL ESTATE PROBLEM: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans & Comedy by Kliph Nesteroff. Copyright © 2021 by Kliph Nesteroff. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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