Honolulu Weekly

Paul Ogata / Since departing the Islands for Los Angeles in 2006, Paul Ogata has been making a name for himself in the world of stand-up comedy by not only winning the prestigious San Francisco Comedy Competition last year (a contest that has featured notable past competitors like Dane Cook and Robin Williams) but also making subsequent appearances on Comedy Central’s Live in Gotham and the syndicated show Comics Unleashed. Ogata is back in the Islands to headline a show at Pipeline Cafe tonight, but spoke last week to Honolulu Weekly about his career and a touring schedule that will see him performing in San Francisco, Lake Tahoe, Hong Kong and Singapore by the end of 2008 and into 2009.

Have you been able to make the adjustment from doing stand-up in Hawai’i to doing it across the country?

Yeah, I think so. When I was in Hawai’i, it was always my plan at some point to go to California or somewhere on the mainland and do comedy. So, I structured my comedy with that in mind so that I could take a lot of that material elsewhere. You can talk about Filipinos in Hawai’i but some places may not have heard of that. If you go to Nebraska, they wont get a lot of the Filipino jokes. So you have to broaden your horizons.

How does a comic from Hawai’i broaden his horizons?

Well, I think it’s taking chances, it’s paying attention to everything else around you besides Portagee jokes, which are funny, but not a lot of people will get that sort of stuff elsewhere. So, you pay attention to what’s going on. Fortunately for me, I am unfortunate in that a lot of bad and/or stupid things happen to me. So, I am able to talk about that as well and that translates universally.

How would you describe your current act?

[Laughs] How would I describe it? A graceful ballet of man and wit. Lofting one liners from plie to releve in the dance floor of your mind–but with fart jokes. [laughs] I don’t know, I’ve never reviewed my act.

You were mentioning that you have to restructure your act to perform in other parts of the country. Has that meant moving from ethnic jokes to more observational humor?

Yes and no. I mean there’s a lot of ethnic jokes you can’t do in other places that you can do in Hawai’i and there are a lot of ethnic jokes you can do in other places that you can’t do in Hawai’i. So, keep your eyes open and see what will work and what won’t work and you also turn to other avenues like observational stuff, current events, politics–things of that nature.

How important was winning the San Francisco Comedy Competition last year?

Well, in one sense, it’s a really great honor. When you look at the history of the contest and see the kind of comedians who not only won before but participated, a lot of great comics never won the contest–Roseanne Barr never made it out of the preliminaries, Ellen DeGeneres took second–and then there are comics like Dana Carvey, Sinbad, Jake Johannsen, Doug Stanhope who did win and went on to huge things in comedy. In that sense, it is a great honor and it is important as a validation for me that I can look at and say, “Wow, I guess I have been doing the right thing after all.” And I can show my parents and say, “See, it wasn’t all for nothing.” But in another sense, it’s what you make of it. There are some people who have won and you have never heard from them again. I hope not to be one of those. I hope to use this as a springboard to bigger and better things.

Speaking of bigger and better things, have you got any TV or film work out of it?

The unfortunate thing is that after I won, the entire industry went on strike for several months. That put a damper on things. I had some things on the burner and it may or may not have happened. But on the bright side, I was able to do Live at Gotham on Comedy Central, Comics Unleashed which is syndicated around the world and the movie I did last December which should be out in 2009.

What’s the movie?

[Laughs] It’s Porndogs: The Adventures of Sadie.

I’m afraid to ask what it’s about?

It’s a live action movie with dogs and they do the CGI thing with the mouth and we voice the dogs. I’m the Shar-Pei because it’s type casting. It’s the story of Sadie, a golden retriever. It’s a coming-of-age story. I think I’m the first dog she ends up having doggie relations with. It may sound weird, but I think it has the potential to be some sort of big subversive cult comedy, or it will be the end of my career.

So, the demographic would be what? Canines aged 7–17?

[laughs] Or 49–98 in human years. It’s a comedy. It stars Paul Rodriguez–I roped him into this project with me so I’m not going down alone. Who else is in it? A bunch of names you will be familiar with if you went to the old Queens Theater–Ron Jeremy, Marilyn Chambers, Heidi Fleiss is in it, the rapper Too Short is in it.

An unfortunate name given the context.

[laughs] and Screech–Dustin Diamond from Saved by the Bell. It’s a bunch of people who have nothing to lose except me.

What are the differences between performing in Hong Kong or Macau and performing in New York?

Not much because it’s an English-speaking crowd and because it is American stand-up comedy that they’re coming to see. So, they get it, they understand it and Hong Kong is a very international city–more so than New York. People from Britain, Canada, Australia, Holland, Sweden. They all understand American comedy, they get it. I really enjoy that. I enjoy playing to different crowds in my interaction with them on stage.

What’s the difference between the comedy scene on the Mainland and the one here in Hawai’i?

In Hawai’i, there were clubs that opened and shut down, which is unfortunate because basically you don’t have a full-time comedy club in Hawai’i. You get several opportunities for people to perform–open mics, Sharkey’s is doing something in Waikl-kl-, but what I would hope for the sake of comics in Hawai’i is that someone opens a comedy club here and brings talent in from the Mainland. And that does two things–it lets people see a different variety of comics and it allows the local comics to learn from and watch those touring professionals. It’s like school. It’s like college–comedy college.

What about the audiences?

In some parts of Los Angeles–you know in Hollywood–it’s an industry town. So, you have a lot of people in the industry in the audience and some nights the ratio of industry to civilian is really large and that makes for a tough show because they’re jaded and instead of laughing, they jot notes down. So, what I appreciate with shows outside of Hollywood is that you get real people, civilians.

People who want to laugh, instead of taking notes.

Exactly and the irony is that industry people make for a harder show, but the harder show makes it harder to impress the industry people. But that’s the cruel joke you put up with when you do shows in Hollywood. But Hawai’i audiences have always been great. It’s kind of a unique culture, the audiences in Hawai’i. We were raised on a different kind of comedy, different kind of life in Hawai’i far from the stresses of freeway shooting, acid rain and the pollution of Los Angeles. We’re a fun-loving culture in Hawai’i. We love to laugh. That’s why I love performing here.

Pipeline Cafe, 805 Pohukaina St., Wed 12/10, 8pm, $20 general, $40 VIP, [pipelinecafehawaii.com], 589-1999