This article examines how socio-legal performance in the public realm might operate to question, expose and exploit social and legal norms that can exist in the everyday. With the tactical deployment of humor – and a particular focus on how the Treaty of Waitangi (1840) may continue to operate as a cultural/political force in Aotearoa/New Zealand today – this article explores the contribution that socio-legal artistic performance might make to reveal the tensions, inherent in the 1840 agreement between British colonizers and Māori, as continuing to affect the very foundations of law in Aotearoa/New Zealand and its everyday contemporary articulations.