Hawaii’s Funniest Columnist

It’s hard to be funny. All writers like to think they are, though few hit the mark on a consistent basis.

But Charles Memminger, humor columnist for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, has perfected the art form. A two-time winner of the National Society of Newspaper Journalists for the best humor column, he just released a collection of his funniest columns in a book called Hey Waiter, There’s An Umbrella In My Drink.

For those unfamiliar with his work, Memminger brings a comic’s eye to the idiosyncrasies of living in the Islands. His columns have taken on everyone from missionaries to mongooses to mayonnaise - he’s actually started an anti-mayonnaise society - but he says the book will be accessible even to those who don’t inhabit our Islands.

“We needed something the tourists could take home so it can’t be too much inside coconut baseball kind of stuff,” says Memminger, who started his career in West Virginia and then, oddly enough, Guam.

“It’s got to have a shelf life, it’s got to be stuff that people on the Mainland can understand. Its still mostly about Hawaii, the Pacific and the tropics. There are only so many kimchee jokes you can do or people in Ohio aren’t going to get it.”

Though he always liked the idea of being a columnist, he got his start in the newspaper business like many young reporters - covering the police beat and the courts. He returned to the Islands in 1980, his father was in the military here and Memminger actually graduated from Aiea High School, and began covering crime for the Star-Bulletin.

He immersed himself in his work, going so far as to put a police scanner in his car and his apartment. Weekend trips to the North Shore with his wife would occasionally be sidetracked as news of a shooting in Waianae would come over the scanner.

“I knew by Monday morning nobody would know what happened,” says Memminger. “So I always carried an aloha shirt in my car. When I would show up at a crime scene the officers would just see some big haole guy in an aloha shirt and figured I was a detective, so I walked right in.”

He loved the work, but as ice began to take its grip on the Islands, he grew tired of covering crime and started petitioning his superiors to allow him to write a column.

“Everything became connected to crystal meth, there weren’t any characters, any Henry Huihuis or hit men like Ronnie Ching,” says Memminger. “It was all just this drug killing stuff, so I moved toward this column.”

At first they let him write one a week, while keeping him busy working on other pieces. But once he won his first NSNJ award in 1992, management realized he was on to something.

“I used to be an investigative journalist, now I am an investigative humorist,” says Memminger. “I dig up stuff and make fun of it. I still comment on a lot of serious stuff, but I do it in a funny way.”

A fine example of this was his pointed analysis of the Celebrity Cruises’ use of a doctored photo of the Kamehameha statue holding a champagne glass for an ad. This excerpt is from the Oct. 5 edition of his Honolulu Lite column.

“You have to wonder whether the PR geniuses would think it clever to use the statue of Abraham Lincoln in an ad for refinancing your home ("I freed the slaves and I can free you from financial servitude. Honest!") or Martin Luther King Jr. in an ad for a mattress sale ("I had a dream, and so can you, on a brand new Super-Duper-Sleeper mattress!") or put Chief Crazy Horse in an ad for a law firm, ("Have you been injured in an accident? You’d be crazy not to Sioux!")"

Though this column is not featured in the book, it gives you a sense of his style, and you can only imagine what he wrote about the whalers and missionaries of 19th century Lahaina.

While this book is a solo effort,

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