Zora Neale Hurston/Paula Gunn Allen

I found Zora Neale Hurston's anecdotal passages in Redressing the Balance very interesting not because they were dealing with particularly enticing subjects but because they had an intriguing amount of ambiguity. "Turpentine Love" was simply a paragraph or two and left just enough information out that one becomes extremely interested in the motives and backgrounds of the characters and their behaviors. Also, the story of of Cai'lin required even further guessing by the reader. What was she doing with the axe? Did she kill her husband, his lover or both? Why did she become outraged at this point? Many of these questions are unanswered in the facts of the story and are left up to the reader. While this is an interesting way to read such stories, I ultimately do not find much redemption in their endings. Many people are different but I personally enjoy stories with factual substance instead of ambiguity. I especially think that this sort of ambiguous storytelling is difficult in terms of finding humor. The author has to be careful or else the humor may be lost. It would be like telling a joke with an unclear punchline. 

Paula Gunn Allen's poem was much more straight-forward in its delivery and objective. The most interesting part of her poem is that much of the humor was pivoted on a single word, "ruins", and the various interpretation of its meaning. Furthermore, I think that such a poem deals with the same "in-crowd/out-crowd" setup as many of the stand-ups we have viewed. Just like how black comedians are able to make racial humor/comments that white comedians cannot say, so do the Native Americans in this poem. Both the man and woman are presumably Native Americans and therefore both are able to find humor in the misinterpretation of "Indian ruins" at the end. However, the humor is not lost on those outside of the group. While a non-Native American would not be able to make the joke, I feel that they can still appreciate it.