Comedian Brian Unger AKA “Unga” is back for a pair of shows in Hilo and Kona.
Comedian Brian Unger AKA “Unga” is back for a pair of shows in Hilo and Kona.
The Hilo born-and-bred Unger, who achieved popularity on the Big Island in the 1980s and early 1990s, will take the stage at 7:30 p.m. Aug. 5 at Aloha Theatre in Kainaliu. Tickets are $10, available at the Aloha Theatre box office and at the door. The roots reggae band, “The Critics” will open the show.
Unger performed July 23 at the East Hawaii Cultural Center in a benefit show for the center.
Unger, who’s lived in Los Angeles since 1991, describes his act as “observational humor about life in Hawaii, storytelling about my family’s history in Hawaii.”
“My great-great grandfather came from Germany on a whaling ship in 1876 to Hawaii. He was a colorful guy,” Unger said. “I talk a little about him and just work my way forward chronologically, my birth in Hilo, adventures on the way — St. Joseph School, University of Hawaii at Hilo. Just working my way through my life with funny stories thrown in.
“I was having a conversation with my sister a couple of weeks ago and she told me, ‘Brian, you’re not really a stand-up comedian. You’re a storyteller.’ And I think she really hit it on the head, because I’m not really a ‘set-up, punchline, set-up, punchline’ kind of comedian. It’s not really how I write; it’s not how I work. I don’t really know how to write jokes like that.”
In case you’re wondering, Unger is the uncle of Max Unger, the Hawaii Preparatory Academy football standout who played college ball at Oregon, won a Super Bowl ring as starting center for the Seattle Seahawks, and now anchors the offensive line of the New Orleans Saints.
“He’s over here. He’s taking a break from the training camps,” Brian Unger said. “He said, ‘I never thought a place could be more humid and hot than Kona, but I found it in New Orleans.’”
Unger, 55, a Parker School and University of Hawaii at Hilo alumni, went to Los Angeles in 1991 to try his hand as an actor and standup comic. He was able to occasionally find an audience as a comedian, but said, “I got nowhere at all with the acting thing.”
“Pursued it for about eight or nine years and cried ‘Uncle.’ I’d had enough,” he said. “So I went back to school and got my teaching credential.”
He teaches high school English in the San Gabriel Valley and said, “I like it a lot.”
Unger isn’t the first educator in the family. His 90-year-old mother, Janice, was the first headmaster of Parker School in 1976. She co-founded the private Waimea school with former Broadway star Richard Smart, who owned Parker Ranch, and Paul De Domenico, the marketing genius of the family that once owned Golden Grain Pasta Co. (Rice-A-Roni). De Domenico founded Hawaiian Holiday Macadamia Nut Co. after selling Golden Grain to Quaker Oats.
“It was Paul De Domenico’s money, Richard Smart’s land and my mother’s elbow grease,” Unger said. “She really doesn’t get any credit for starting that school, but it was her initial idea and her hard work, with all of us kids, to fix up the halls there and paint them, hire teachers and get it all going.”
Unger’s family also owned and operated the Honomu Plantation Store from 1979 to 1989.
“A lot of my material comes from the days in that store, which was a pretty wild time,” he said and added more anecdotes are “about my growing up a haole in Hilo and that I looked just like Alfred E. Neuman (Google him, kids) when I was 12 years old.”
And some of Unger’s material, like that of many local comics, derives from the islands’ racial and cultural melting pot. He describes it as “gentle humor, not mean-spirited at all.”
“A lot of comedians won’t even do college campuses anymore because of political correctness,” he said. “It’s been really detrimental to freedom of speech and it’s really not good for our country. All this micro-aggression. When I was in high school, the local guys would just come up and punch me in the face. So all this micro-aggression is just laughable. It’s laughable to me that people would be offended by a word.”
Unger said he’s been looking forward to these homecoming shows for a while.
“I’ve been working on this for about a year,” he said. “I’ve run this past my brother and he’s a very harsh critic. He’s kind of my cultural barometer here. He lives in Kona and keeps me up to date. So I’m trying to be topical, even though I don’t live here anymore.”
Email John Burnett at jburnett@hawaiitribune-herald.com