Spirit of Aloha | Features | November/December 2004

Mean Old Mr. Sun Cho Lee and the Role of Ethnic Humor in Hawai‘i
By: RITA ARIYOSHI

Comedians are pessimistic about the state of comedy in the islands. Here’s why.

t’s Friday evening and the craft and food booths are set up on Bishop Street for the downtown Ho‘olaule‘a, the street party that’s part of the annual Aloha Festivals. Office workers still shouldering the week’s burdens and stresses are streaming into the streets and milling about.
Their families have braved snarled freeway traffic from Hawai‘i Kai in the east and Pearl City and beyond in the west to join them. They’re
edgy and hungry. The kids are wired for action and have to be restrained
from creating mayhem in the water features at Tamarind Square.

The Royal Court parades over from ‘Iolani Palace. In their feathered capes and helmets, the members of the court look vaguely like a reprimand among the banks, parking garages and towers of commerce. The emcee takes the stage and shouts out his “Alooooha!” He introduces himself, “I’m Tony Solis and I’m Filipino. How many Filipinos here tonight?”.

Cheers and applause rise from the large, local crowd.

“Awright, plenny Filipinos,” Solis shouts. He’s pleased. Then he says, “Eh, no picking the weeds while you sitting here.” Everyone laughs. Instantly, we’re family. We get the joke. The edge, the stress of the day dissolve in humor. Now the good times can roll. But it’s not really the wit that has soothed us. What the blatantly ethnic joke has acknowledged is that we are different races who know each other well and not only manage to live together in a very small space in the middle of nowhere, but recognize and enjoy our differences, and that our small space is our very special, beloved Hawai‘i Nei. We are family and this is our home.

Members of a family know one another’s strengths, weaknesses, virtues and eccentricities—and they make no secret about it. Solis, who is the writer and producer of “The Aloha Morning Show” on KINE radio, says, “I try my comic best when I host. If people don’t feel like they’re part of your world, they’re not with you. Ethnic humor is the glue that binds us. But a lot of people can take it wrong, I’m finding out. ‘Hey, it’s all right,’ I tell them. ‘Have some bagong [raw fertilized egg].’

Frank DeLima, the acknowledged king of ethnic comedy in Hawai‘i, says, “It grew out of plantation days when people lived in camps separated by race to avoid conflicts. All of them thought they’d go back home rich. That’s what they were promised. After the first generation, they couldn’t go back, they had no fare back. So they started to mingle. They had to speak English, but they threw in their own native words and it became a language of its own, pidgin. We all understood it. We made friendships with each other. At first, we were polite, then we laughed at one another’s accents, food, nicknames and stink food. But the humor was acceptable and affectionate. The ethnic humor held up a mirror. You laugh, you are prepared for the real world. Hostile people are no threat to you, because comedy already made you laugh at yourself.”

Patrick Downes, editor of the Hawaii Catholic Herald and the primary writer on DeLima’s team, says, “I don’t even like to call it ethnic humor. It’s local humor, family humor. We tell our jokes in the context of people who have grown up with each other. My sister-in-law may be Hawaiian, my grandfather Filipino, my wife haole. We are talking about children, friends and relatives. That’s why I think it works.”

DeLima, who is of Portuguese heritage, grew up in Pauoa Valley in Honolulu. “All the kids went to the Toyo Theater to watch the samurai movies. Then I’d lie in wait to ambush the neighbors. My mom and dad let me dress up. I wore a sheet to be Superman. I thank them for that. And I thank God for my gift.”

An example of one of DeLima’s most successful ethnic characters is the shy accountant Glenn Miyashiro. Patrick smiles, “Seventy-five percent of local Japanese males between the ages of 25 and 40 have the first name Glenn. Fifty-seven percent are Miyashiro. Ninety-nine percent wear tucked-in reverse-print aloha shirts. Most come from Kaimukï and drive Toyotas. They marry girls named Laurie Yamaguchi and live in Pearl City. They have three children, Justin, Jason and Jessica. Frank tells all this to the tune of ‘Guantanamero.’ It’s the perfect catchy vehicle.”

Comedian Paul Ogata, who was named the Funniest Asian in America in a national Pan-Asian Comedy Competition in 2004 in Waikïkï, capitalizes on the very traits DeLima and Downes target, his Japanese ethnicity and his five-foot-three-inch height. Ogata once told entertainment critic Wayne Harada that being Asian “is a plus and a minus in this business. It pigeonholes you, you get stereotyped.”

Stereotypes are DeLima’s stock in trade. He still dresses up. He becomes the mystifying Chinese magician, Fu Ling Yu; the Samoan football giant, Abdullah Fata‘ai; the Chinese rock star, Bruce Springroll, who sings “Born a Tight Pake” (Chinese); and a sumo wrestler, Lolobono, who does the hula. DeLima himself is known as “the Pocho Prince,” referring to his Portuguese background. The Portuguese, he claims, are “the chosen people.”

Tony Solis says, “People are the funniest things. My humor is observational. People know I enjoy them. I laugh at myself. I was born in the Philippines. They’re the happiest Calamity Janes. Humor is the cure for a lot of today’s stress. People take things too seriously. I’m a walking insecurity. I’ve got brown skin, I’m overweight, my hair is receding. But I love to poke fun at insecurities. It’s not nasty. I can laugh at myself and it’s OK. The media tells us we have to be thin. Extreme Make-Over makes us feel uncomfortable with ourselves. But God made me this way on purpose, so it’s okay to be me.”

Many years ago, Keola and Kapono Beamer recorded a song, “Mr. Sun Cho Lee,” which, decades later, still gets air time. A new version with further ad libs can be found on a CD entitled Pure Heart, by Pure Heart. The song begins:

“Mr. Sun Cho Lee got plenty lychee.

Got plenty lychee, but he no gives to me

And he’s just one mean old pake man.”

The lyrics proceed to take on the mean old haole (Caucasian) man Mr. Conrad Jones and his swimming pool; Mr. Maximo Concepcion, “the mean old Pilipino man” who keeps fighting chickens; Mr. Kazuo Tanaka, the mean old Japanese man burdened with “plenty camera supply” and poor Mr. Kamakawiwo‘ole, the mean old Hawaiian man who “got plenty too much of nothing, got plenty nothing, he takes it out on me.”

With songs like this being so popular, it’s almost a relief to find your own race parodied because, whew, you’re local. Being more local than thou is the highest Island virtue.

Not everybody gets the joke, however. In 1997, parents of two African-American students at Kaläheo High School in Kailua, O‘ahu, sued for $28 million when a photograph of their children appeared in the school yearbook above a caption they considered racially offensive. It never occurred to the student editors, or even their adult supervisors, that the caption, which poked fun at stereotypical food preferences, such as pigs’ feet and collard greens, would be deemed hurtful enough to end up in court. After all, the Koreans have been hearing about their kim chee and the Filipinos their bagong forever. Strange as it may seem to non-Islanders, the racial slur was not intended to be cruel. It meant that the students, whose parents worked at the Kaneohe Marine Base, had been fully accepted into Hawai‘i’s family. The lawsuit and its attendant publicity triggered a backlash among other ethnic groups, who wanted to know, “Why can’t newcomers take a joke?”

Diane Yukihiro Chang addressed the issue in an editorial in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, noting, “The problem is knowing where to draw the line. To young people, it’s all very confusing. Why is it OK to laugh at Frank DeLima, but not all right to put racial slurs in a cutline?”

On Sept. 13, 1997, David Shapiro, managing editor of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, wrote: “Slavery was the worst act of oppression in U.S. history. The yearbook slur was the most insulting kind of stereotype of the descendants of slaves. How long can we keep asking black children to accept these affronts and ‘get over it?’ We must never minimize the horror of slavery and its continuing legacy of suffering. We must never forget those of many races who died in the 1860s to end slavery and in the 1960s to seek true freedom for the descendants of slaves. Was the insult worth $28 million? No. But if that’s what it takes to inspire our schools to act firmly against cruel racism, that’s the way it’ll have to be.”

In the past 25 years, Frank DeLima has visited approximately 5,000 schools in his Student Enrichment Program. He talks to students in kindergarten to grade eight about self-esteem, character building and ethnic humor. “Sixty percent of the kids are not getting self-esteem,” he says. “Parents don’t go to church. They’re working two or three jobs. Many are immigrants and don’t speak English. The kids are on their own. I reach them through humor, so they pay attention. I’m the funny man they see on the TV commercials. I tell them teasing is not comedy. Teasing is wrong. The class clown gets scoldings for using his gift in the wrong way. I tell them if you get teased you gotta tell someone, and not your best friend who is the same age as you. Tell an adult, a parent or a teacher. Even go to the fire station—there’s one in every neighborhood—and tell a fire fighter.”


Solis recalled doing an interview with DeLima. “When it was finished, Frank asked for an escort to his car in the parking lot. Yeah, he’s had his life threatened over his ethnic jokes.”

DeLima, who once studied for the Catholic priesthood, quotes Thomas Aquinas in Latin, translating it roughly: “I can tell you anything and it depends on how you receive it. Whatever is said depends on how the receiver receives it, and many times you won’t know. We cannot expect an immigrant to get acclimated right away. It’s hard. Females love what I say. The males get upset. Their self-esteem is not good because they’re pulling weeds for a living. Pride causes anger. They’re self-conscious and afraid to mingle. But the thing is, they have to learn local ways if they are to make their home in Hawai‘i. Don’t try to make Hawai‘i like the Mainland or Korea. Mix. We need the bon dance, the lü‘au, the square dance, the powwow, the Greek Festival, the Cherry Blossom Queen, Miss Filipina. These are beautiful things. But nobody is perfect. Imperfections strike the outsider as funny.”

Ethnic humor has often been used to avoid ugly confrontations. When local surfers take to the waves in Waikïkï and a tourist with no knowledge of surfing etiquette or perhaps any regard for it, drops in on a wave that has been staked out by someone else, the local will say to his friend, “Typical haole,” meaning, “Poor thing. He doesn’t know any better.” Because the offender is pitied, he isn’t punched. Rude drivers in Hawai‘i are often categorized as typical of their race. This causes the offended driver to sigh deeply in long-suffering aloha, and it elicits a sense of satisfaction that he, himself, is of a superior and very polite race.”

The jury is still out on the future of ethnic humor in the Islands. DeLima is pessimistic about the state of comedy in general in Hawai‘i. “There’s no place to work in Waikïkï. There were 10 show rooms in Waikïkï in 1975 and I counted 53 different places to go to hear singles, trios, show bands, comedians. Four show rooms are left.” DeLima blames television, the drunk-driving laws, wars. He says, “Tourists now want name recognition. They go to Planet Hollywood, the Cheesecake Factory. They go to places like Outback Steakhouse and don’t go out after. There are so many freebies, too. Attitudes change. My generation and two below still understand ethnic humor. Slowly we’re losing it. A lot of kids are not from here. The percentage of immigrants, foreign and Mainland, is huge. Humor is not working like it used to. Humor taught humility. It allowed the differences to be funny,”

Solis, who also hosts a television show, Eh! You da Kine, Ah?, is a bit more optimistic. “A lot of people are tired of PC [political correctness]. They want to laugh. We’re talking about being overweight and we say, ‘How does it feel to be gravitationally challenged?’ Just call me fat. I’m a fat guy. I’m that book-book guy. People want to laugh at themselves. There are more independent comedy shows coming on. It’s been dry over the past decade. It’s tough. You have to make it happen. If I open in Waikiki, I have to read the crowd. But I’m not afraid of ethnic comedy. If one person is offended, 10 love it.”

The closing lines of the song “Mr. Sun Cho Lee,” summarize the situation, “One thing I went notice ’bout this place. All us guys we tease the other race. It’s amazing we can live in the same place.”

RITA ARIYOSHI is a multiple winner of the Lowell Thomas travel journalism awards. She is also a recipient of the Pushcart Prize for literature and grand-award winner in the National Steinbeck Short Story Competition.

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