Go Go Waikiki

SPOILER WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU STILL PLAN ON WATCHING THIS SERIES OR HAVEN’T FINISHED IT YET!!

Go Go Waikiki/Laughter in Waikiki
(으라차차 와이키키 / Eulachacha Waikiki)
MyDramaList rating: 6.5/10

Hello everybody! Back with my new review.
I hope everyone is doing well in this crazy time of quarantine, sitting/working at home. Since May is quite the national holiday month where I’m from, I’m currently enjoying my second long weekend in a row, which gives me good opportunities to watch more dramas and relax, but at the same time working from home is becoming more and more dreary. I hope everyone is hanging in there!

This drama has been on my list for way too long, probably since 2018 when it came out. I think mostly because of Kim Jung Hyun, because I liked him in the previous dramas I saw with him (Jealousy Incarnate, School 2017). I probably saw the trailer and thought it looked funny so I put it on my list – as I said, it’s been a while and I don’t remember my reason for listing every drama, haha. Anyways, it’s a comedy, all right.

Go Go Waikiki is about three guys, Kang Dong Gu (played by Kim Jung Hyun), Lee Joon Ki (played by Lee Yi Kyung) and Bong Doo Shik (played by Song Seung Won). They run a guesthouse called Waikiki, along with Dong Gu’s sister Kang Seo Jin (played by Go Won Hee) who also lives there.
Business is bad, in the first episode water, gas and electricity are cut off because they can’t pay their bills for lack of guests. The three friends have one shared dream: making a movie together. Dong Gu is an aspiring director, Doo Shik is a writer and Joon Ki is a rookie actor.
Things become tense when they find an abandoned baby in one of their rooms – soon to be claimed back by her single mother, Han Yoon Ah (played by Jung In Sun). Yoon Ah has nowhere to go and ends up living at the guesthouse as well, provided that she helps run the place. Lastly, Dong Gu’s ex-girlfriend Min Soo Ah (played by Lee Joo Woo), comes to join them after she gets conned and robbed by the boyfriend she dumped Dong Gu for. The six of them all try to make their own living while tackling personal problems in relationships, work and life in general. We follow them in their daily lives as they get through all sorts of awkward situations.

First of all, Go Go Waikiki is like a sitcom. It doesn’t have a real storyline, it’s just a daily-life-of kind of series. Every episode lasts about an hour and consists of at least 3 sub-chapters. It’s interesting to see that, although at first it’s really just about the three guys, the girls and their stories also enter one by one and become more regular. Soo Ah only starts becoming a regular character halfway through the series, at first she’s just Dong Gu’s ex that dumps him and never wants to see him again. But when she gets into trouble and becomes a regular character, we find out she’s actually also a little crazy, same as everyone else.

Let me briefly go through the ‘storylines’ of each character. First, we have Dong Gu. In the beginning he is very impatient and grumpy. In the first episode, he is dumped by Soo Ah and he attempts to sell their golden couple rings to get money to pay their bills but he ends up feeling too guilty after being busted at the jewelry store by Soo Ah. He has a hard time getting over her, attempts a few times to win her back, even uses Yoon Ah to try and make her jealous, but in the end they have a good closure talk and it’s over between them. After that, he starts focussing on his main goal and even gets the opportunity to work with a director he used to know on a new movie project. He starts developing feelings for Yoon Ah about halfway through after they have to pretend to get married to fool the guesthouse’s landlady and she kisses him. Even though he was the meanest to her out of everyone when she first moved into the guesthouse, he becomes softer and more mature because of her, even willing to become a father figure to Sol, the baby. In the beginning, his stories mainly consist of continually embarassing himself in front of Soo Ah after she already gets a new boyfriend.

Then there’s Joon Ki. Joon Ki is a very expressive, energetic person. He knows no shame when it comes to acting, in fact he puts on an act everytime he delivers his portfolio to a casting agency. His stories mainly consist of acting jobs that he gets with really weird co-starts. Of course, no matter how weird his co-stars are, Joon Ki always seems to be the only one who can’t deal with them. The director and the other people are never bothered by it. Here we get a lot of guest appearances from famous actors. For example, we have an actor who doesn’t talk but only points with his finger to communicate and everyone except Joon Ki is able to understand him. Then there’s this woman who gets so immersed in her grief-stricken mother role that she almost punches Joon Ki to death. There’s a guy who just had tongue surgery and can’t pronounce Joon Ki’s role name correctly, to which Joon Ki can’t control his laughter etc. But because of his determination to make it as an actor he always gets through it by himself. Even if he has to wear monster make-up for an entire day because the shoot is postponed, or when he has to emotionally bond with a turtle to satsify the director. All sorts of insane situations occur within Joon Ki’s life, probably the most of everyone. Halfway through, Seo Jin suddenly finds herself attracted to him and while he can’t see her as anything more than a little girl in the beginning, he changes his mind when he sees how much of a woman she can be. In the beginning Joon Ki and Seo Jin are like cats and dogs, but they make a weirdly adorable couple.

Doo Shik is the most mild-mannered of the three guys and he works part-time at a convenience store while trying to work on a manuscript called ‘The President is Bruce Lee’ or something like that. Doo Shik’s gimmick is that he falls in love at first sight way too often. The running gag is that whenever this happens, the sound of his beating heart becomes so loud that even others can hear it. However, his crushes never end well, even after a girl agrees to go out with him. Maybe it’s his lack of true knowledge about women, but he always unknowingly screws things up in his attempts to show affection. Despite his mild-mannered nature, there are moments when he loses his temper, not often, but when it happens he takes off his glasses and starts yelling and cursing and whatnot. When Soo Ah moves in he starts helping her with her new online shopping market, even though he has to wear her ridiculous self-designed clothing as the only model they have. He spends a lot of time dealing with Soo Ah and in the end Soo Ah confesses she likes him and it is suggested that they start dating (we don’t see it but we can assume from how they act in the last episode).

Han Yoon Ah is a single mother a baby who’s not even a year old yet. She gave birth to the baby after being forced to break up with the baby’s father, so he doesn’t even know she had his baby. She doesn’t have anywhere to go and in a moment of irrationality she left her baby in the guesthouse – but she comes to get her back the next day because she felt too guilty.
After the break-up with Sol’s father she has had a hard time trusting people so she’s a bit awkward in interacting with the guesthouse residents in the beginning, pulling up her shirt to feed Sol in public without a warning and stuff like that. Her biggest dream is to become a rapper, but it turns out she doesn’t really have a talent for it (I thought it was cute, though). She screws up a couple of times with cooking, but after surprising everyone with some delicious muffins, her new dream becomes to become a patissier and she starts attending baking classes. Because of her petite appearance and kind and naive demeanor, she’s the kind of woman guys fall for because she exudes that vibe of ‘someone you want to protect’. She is pursued by a number of guys, but in the end they’re all chased away by Dong Gu when he starts falling for her as well. She rejects him at first because she’s too scared she’ll get hurt again, but in the end she’s the mature one in the relationship while Dong Gu shows the most worries about her choosing someone else over him. In the last episode, Sol’s father turns up and makes a weak attempt to win her back, but she firmly tells him that she loves Dong Gu. When Dong Gu proposes to her partly out of her that she’ll leave when he’s gone (he’s about to go abroad for a month for work), she comforts him in saying that he shouldn’t worry so much because she doesn’t, and that she’ll be with him forever.

Kang Seo Jin has just graduated and is looking for a job. Her dream is to be a reporter. Kang Seo Jin’s running gag is that her facial hair tends to grow quite rapidly, and if she doesn’t shave for a day or more, she gets a moustache. At first it’s something she’s really embarassed about, she doesn’t dare let the sunbae she’s dating know and she tries to hide it as well as she can. But at some point she starts accepting it more because the people around her do too. In the beginning Joon Ki makes a lot of jokes about it, he even nicknames her ‘Chewbacca’. When she lands a job at a news agency, Seo Jin struggles with a particularly power-abusing senior who sends her on all kinds of impossible errands and gives her unnecessary deadlines. After she and Joon Ki start dating and Joon Ki lands a main role on a drama series and gets more busy and starts having less time for her, she starts to feel neglected. Although she supports and helps him whenever she can, at a certain point it becomes too much of effort for her because she herself isn’t feeling so great either, and she decides to take a break. Joon Ki fixes it by clearing up all misunderstandings and genuinely telling her how much he loves her.

Min Soo Ah, in the beginning, seems to be the kind of girl who is way out of Dong Gu’s league. She’s a model, she’s tall, skinny, pretty etc. When she breaks up with him we have already seen what a mess Dong Gu is, so we (at least I) can’t really blame her. She seems to be happy with her new boyfriend until she gets conned and robbed by him and now has nowhere to go. Reluctantly she moves into her ex-boyfriend’s guesthouse. With her dream to become a fashion designer, she launches an online shopping mall called Soorgio Armhani with the help of Doo Shik. Even though her designing talents are not very good and the mall doesn’t provide much business, she still continues to search for that one thing that makes her happy. And eventually she realizes that Doo Shik’s help means a lot to her, not just because he’s a friend but also because she starts seeing more and more good traits in him. In the end she confesses to him under the influence of an anesthetic during an endoscopy because she ate a piece of paper on which she had written the love match calculation between her and Doo Shik and didn’t want him to find it. This is exactly the kind of situations this drama is filled with.

So, I have basically summed up almost all of the running gags and jokes and situations that are most regular in this series. Apart from that, there were some moments that were really disgusting. There was this one scene in Joon Ki’s storyline (the one with the actress so immersed in her role that she beat him up), in which she was hanging over him, all snot and tears, and her snot actually fell into Joon Ki’s mouth. I literally gagged when they showed that and even just thinking about it makes me nauseous again. Things like that, and humor about people farting and getting indigestion etcetera.
Sometimes the jokes were really predictable and so overly slapstick that it became more like ‘Oh haha let me guess, this and this is going to happen, oh look what a surprise that’s exactly what happened’.
Things like: something happens to someone or someone’s appearance which makes it really difficult to go out, and then they’re suddenly called in to meet someone really important and it’s the worst possible timing.
I think it’s difficult to come up with a lot of ‘funny’ situations, because we’ve all seen enough cartoons in which all these kinds of situations have happened before. So sometimes the humor became a bit too predictable and lame for me. But it doesn’t take away the fact that I also laughed out loud a lot while watching. Particularly about Joon Ki, because as hysterical his character may be, the actor had really great timing in his comedy.

About the actors, I would like to give some comments as well.
As I mentioned before, I knew Kim Jung Hyun, mainly for being the male lead in School 2017, where he acted alongside Kim Se Jung (love her). In both that and Jealousy Incarnate he played a mainly stoic character who didn’t show a lot of emotion. So it was really interesting to see him act so over the top in this ultra-comedy. It really brought out a new side in him.

I’ve also seen Lee Yi Kyung a couple of times before, I think it was in Go Back Couple that he also played a comical character, and for the rest he played a lot of side characters as well. At one point, I think it might have been a reference, in a picture of the guys when they were younger it showed Joon Ki with really long hair and he looked exactly the same as his younger version in Go Back Couple when they went back in time. Since this drama was full of inside jokes and references it might have been one.
But here, as one of the main characters, he really want all out with the comedy. Sometimes it was really obnoxious, but you still grew to love his character because we as viewers learn to accept that that’s how he is.
I think he showed great comical timing and talent.

I knew Son Seung Won mainly as Ji Won’s friend in Age of Youth because I shipped them so much, lol. It was nice to see him get a bigger part and show off more of his acting talents. For me, Doo Shik was one of the most sympathetic characters because he was less manic than the others. It’s nice to have a bit of calm in between all the hectic crazy.

Jung In Sun looks REALLY familiar to me, but when I check Dramawiki I can’t find what I know her from. I’ve seen Circle but I don’t remember her from there even though she had an important role.
Anyways, this woman is SO. FREAKING. ADORABLE.
Like, literally, she is so tiny and cute and pouty! I just want to hug her. But I really liked the balance they showed in her character, because even though from the outside she is this adorable little woman with her big round eyes and pouty lips, but on the other hand she’s been through a big thing, she’s a single mom and she is not someone who just lets herself get swept away by the next best man who claims he can take her of her and her baby. She really stood her ground the entire time, rejecting people and being real with people while they expected her to just go with it. Loved her character.
As one of the inside jokes, in the first episode when everyone was pretending Yoon Ah had already left the guesthouse but Dong Gu finds out she and the baby are still there, Joon Ki denies that it’s Yoon Ah and says something like ‘that’s not her, that’s someone else! Hello miss In Sun!’, which is of course a reference to the actress’s real name.
Also, WHO IS THAT BABY?! I can’t find her in the credits, though I’m sure she must be credited somewhere. Little Sol was so adorable T^T

I didn’t know Go Won Hee before, but I like that she had the guts to perform such weird situations, especially the facial hair parts. In the beginning it was maybe funny and embarrassing, but I found myself not being bothered by it quite fast into the series. I mean, what the hell does it matter?
There was this one crazy moment when the sunbae she was dating had this really nasty habit of picking his nose until it started bleeding and when she confronted him and tried to help him stop, despite pretending not to care about her facial hair, he suddenly went all ‘Hey, I accepted your moustache, can’t you accept this from me? I mean, what’s more embarrassing, picking your nose or having facial hair as a woman?’ Of course, he lost all respect there. I mean, seriously? I would say nose picking is the most nasty habit, especially the way he did it, and it’s not healthy. Growing facial hair, even as a woman, is natural and human. And you can always shave it. So his argument was nowhere near valid there. Anyways, even though sometimes I found Seo Jin a bit annoying, she really matured throughout the series.
There is this episode in which she was so fed up with Joon Ki’s habit of goofing around that she actually forbade him from making jokes and being funny because it was ‘childish and embarrassing’. Which basically translates to her not accepting him for who he is. Because making jokes and goofing around is who Joon Ki is. After trying to please her command his energy was literally drained because he couldn’t be himself. At that moment I really thought, girl, this is the last thing you should ask from your lover.
Luckily, she realized this after he actually had to go to the hospital due to too much stress and drained energy. In the last two episodes, when they’re relationship was in jeopardy, I found her very mature. We all saw for ourselves how Joon Ki just took her support for granted. When he had to cancel on her again, he would just apologize and take her ‘It’s okay’ as being the final word. He never went out of his way to look if she was really okay, which she wasn’t. In other words, I could totally relate why she wanted a break, even though it wasn’t easy on Joon Ki either.
I liked how in the last episodes we saw some serious acting from her, she did a good job.

Lastly, even though she also looked familiar to me, I also didn’t know Lee Joo Woo. But I liked how she also found her balance between the Soo Ah in the first and latter halfs of the series. In the beginning she seemed to be the cool, has-got-her-stuff-together kind of girl who was way too normal and succesful to be a part of the guesthouse residents’ life. But after being scammed and having to rely on herself, suddenly this crazy streak came out and she wasn’t shy to act out scenes in which she got insane indigestion and her running gag became that she farted while sleeping a lot. I always appreciate actors who dare to come out of their comfort zone and show this kind of over the top acting while it goes against their outward appearance stereotype.

All the characters have ‘pretty’ and ‘ugly’ characteristics, and even after finishing the series I’m not able to say that I found all of them all that sympathetic or friendly per se, but that’s what make them very realistic, human characters. They all have a dream and they all go towards that dream with all the falling down and getting ups that are needed to eventually get there. Of course, the situations they get themselves in are very exaggerated, and in real life everything would just be solved by telling someone the truth. Honestly, some episodes were so Dear Evan Hansen, they just dug their way deeper and deeper into their own lie while it would’ve been so easy to act normal and just tell the truth.
I can imagine that for this reason (the craziness, the unnecessary dramatics) some people might not like this drama and find it too slapstick. As I said, there were moments where I had that too, when things were just so predictable it kind of took the ‘funny’ out of it. But underneath the overly comedy-ness it was a nice story about a group of people who learned to accept themselves and each other and found each other to enjoy being a messy bunch together. It’s also about accepting the unusual about other people, because there’s a lot of crazy types of characters and somehow they all have people who accept them for who they are. So I think that may also be a hidden message of this series.

Lastly I would just like to say how much I appreciated the ending. The final episode was so wholesome, everything was wrapped up really nicely, all the couples ended up back together with all their problems fixed and the epilogue (2 months later) showed how they actually started working on their own super low-budget movie. It’s nice they made full circle, mentioning their dream of making movies in the beginning when it’s still a really far away and impossible goal, and then actually ending with the whole gang working on the movie together. And then they had to run because they didn’t have a permit to shoot and had to flee from the police. I really liked the ending shot of them all running and then jumping in the air as the lovely misfit bunch they were.

I noticed that there’s a second season or sequel to this drama, in which only Joon Ki seems to be remaining from this season’s cast. I’m not sure if I’ll watch it, maybe in the future when I’m up for some more crazy comedy, haha.

To sum things up, Go Go Waikiki/Laughter in Waikiki is almost like a sitcom, it’s a really light and comical series. I enjoyed it while sometimes just putting on an episode in the background and glancing over while I was drawing or something. Because of its format as a comedy, the lack of storyline actually makes it really easy to watch because you don’t have to focus or really pay attention. Of course there’s a continuity in which they talk about things that happened in previous episodes, but it’s really necessary to pay attention to all the details. The dividing of every episode into three parts is also nice because for some reason it helps to make the one hour plus something episodes feel like they’re NOT more than an hour long. It’s just like watching three short episodes within one.

I’m working through my 2018 batch as you may have noticed, next up is another Japanese drama which I have been looking forward to. I will post my next review as soon as I’m done with that one! Stay tuned! 🙂