Into The Night With Andy
Move over Letterman and Leno, funny man Andy Bumatai is taking over the late night talk show scene — Hawaiian style
By Chad Pata
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license. These work with the intimacy of television but not in stand-up.”
More daunting than softening his style is the inner workings of being a good host, says Bryan. Knowing how to draw the best from a bad guest and knowing when to step out of the light and let a good guest shine.Watching dry runs of the show, Bumatai seems to have the knack, at least with people he knows. He helped draw the humor out of columnist Charles Memminger who is more used to entertaining with his keyboard than his mouth and stood aside as longtime buddy Don Stroud regaled him with some of his classic stories.
The set itself has a cool, urban feel from the sleek lines of the Design Center provided furniture to the bank of windows behind the desk showing off the hustle and bustle of Piikoi Street. Bumatai will even have a joystick that controls an external camera called the “Accident Cam” that he can toggle to follow any action that may occur outside the HDC.
In fact, the set appears that it could as easily be in New York as Honolulu, which has a few naysayers complaining.
“People look at the set and say, ‘what’s Hawaiian about this?‘and I say, well, me,” says Bumatai with a laugh. “Like I always say, I am not a Hawaiian comedian, I am a comedian who happens to be Hawaiian.”
Which leads us to the goals of the show, not just to entertain local people, but also to take it to the national level and compete against the heavyweights in the business.
“Once we got this running like a machine, we are going to take it out to the full hour format,” says Bryan.
“So that literally at 9:35 every night after the 9 o’clock news we will be doing the same thing that Leno and Letterman are doing after the 10 o’clock news. We are on an hour earlier and by that time we hope to be on that same scale. And the future plans are that we hope to get this on a network or syndicated and go after the nighttime talk show wars.”
In order to accomplish that goal, Bumatai can be local, without being too local, a trick he learned in his years in Vegas.
“Local people would come up to me at Caesars Palace and say ‘what brah, da guys understand you,’” remembers Bumatai. “My answer was always, no, Caesars Palace often hires people that can’t be understood.
“What we are doing here will be palatable to anyone. I believe we are hip enough in this town that we can talk about things that are ‘local’ and still be hip enough for Peoria. I am not going to bust out an esoteric colloquialism that can’t be understood anywhere outside Waimanalo.”
To illustrate his point Bumatai recalls a story about when he was performing with Dana Carvey and during his bit Bumatai used the local expression “Not” as two characters argued about the wave one of them had caught. Carvey pulled him aside after the show and asked about the bit and how locals used the word.
Months later on Saturday Night Live, the characters of Wayne and Garth were born in a bit named “Wayne’s World” and how do they dispute one another’s claims?
“Wow, what a totally excellent discovery ... Not!”
Next thing they knew, the expression is sweeping the country and Carvey goes on to make two blockbuster films with the character.
“He used it differently than we used it, but look how that one pidgin expression, how nationally palatable it was,” says Bumatai.
“You know how many of those things there are: the shaka sign, ‘no way, Jose’ the rhymy stymy stuff. It’s just a matter of being discovered.
“I’m not going to be the guy that’s trying to take pidgin national, I’m going to be a guy doing a show where the Hawaiian-isms ooze up naturally.”
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