For the sixth year in a row, Bill Maher is in Hawaii for shows sandwiching the move to the new year.

But after four years of solo shows, last year the host of HBO’s “Real Time” put a twist on this new tradition — New Year’s Eve show in Honolulu, New Year’s Day on Maui — adding a pair of guests, bringing more of a party atmosphere to the show.

He vowed to bring two different friends each year, and last year’s addition of Jeff Ross and David Spade went so well that bringing veteran comics Margaret Cho and Dana Gould with him this year was a no-brainer, not that Maher necessarily remembers it all.

At last year’s show on Maui, “I performed with a concussion,” Maher said in a phone call from Los Angeles. “I’m a bodysurfer, and it’s my joy when I come to Hawaii to spend all day in the ocean like when I was 8 years old, and I got slammed to the surf. I was supposed to do Jimmy Kimmel on Jan. 9, I remember, and I had to cancel ’cause my face was all (messed) up. So I was kinda like out of it that night, and that’s all I remember. … This year I’m gonna be a little more careful in the surf.”

The first qualification for joining Maher on his annual six-day Hawaii vacation, he says, is that he enjoy your company.

“I would never invite someone on the trip … who I didn’t already have a great fondness for and want to spend time with and have dinner with six nights in a row,” Maher said.

Also important is that the guests and Maher have some chemistry, which, after a quarter-century of friendship, Maher has with Cho and Gould.

“The audience feels it when there’s history between the folks on stage, and that’s kinda nice,” Maher said.

Those 25-odd years are not the only connection these three comics have. All three, in Maher’s words, “did not like the way the election went.”

Maher, Cho and Gould have all been outspoken in their criticism of President-elect Donald Trump. Maher’s material is mostly political, and this year’s guests work far more in that vein than last year’s did. (See the sidebar for more on their political thoughts.)

Cho has performed in Hawaii even more than Maher has (“at least 10 times”) and was eager to sign up for this bill.

“I just love him (Maher),” Cho said in a phone conversation. “I think it’s going to be a great show. The times are calling for hard-hitting political comedy. It’s really what we need.”

CHO WAS born and raised in San Francisco, contributing to her development as a topical comic. Though her early material (and her 1990s sitcom “All-American Girl”) focused on her experiences as a young Korean-American, she has become more and more political. She has appeared in Hawaii over the years, giving local audiences a taste of her evolution.

“San Francisco is a very political city and a very progressive city,” Cho said, “so I always felt like this was always part of my work as a performer and an artist, that you want to be political and you want to be talking about issues. It’s a big part of who I am.”

Sexual abuse and rape have also been major topics for Cho, herself a survivor of both.

“You have to talk about these issues because it’s important to shine a light on this very difficult subject,” Cho said. “It’s a way to possibly shift the way we view rape and sexual abuse. … I think it’s good to discuss.”

As important as Cho thinks that is, audiences don’t always agree, which led to a confrontation with the crowd at a New Jersey gig in March. But Cho didn’t let it end there. She decided she wanted to return to the scene for a free make-up show for the same audience. The redo (and the discussion session that preceded it) were featured on Cho’s episode of Jerry Seinfeld’s web series, “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.”

The second show “was amazing and also an important thing to do,” she said. “I think comedians get real angry and they don’t wanna go back to a venue like that. But I was very excited to do that.”

In contrast to Maher and Cho, Gould makes his Hawaii debut this weekend, though he was married on Maui in 2000 and comes back each year.

Gould started in stand-up comedy especially young. Inspired by George Carlin (“we’re Irish, so he was very popular in my household”) and Albert Brooks, Gould started doing sets in his native Massachusetts at age 17, building a presence in Boston’s alternative comedy scene in the 1980s along with comics such as Janeane Garofalo, Marc Maron and David Cross.

He later moved to San Francisco, where he met Cho, and then Los Angeles, where he met Maher and eventually joined the writing staff of “The Simpsons.” That background led to his creation of the IFC horror comedy “Stan Against Evil,” starring John C. McGinley, which was renewed for a second season this month.

“Stan” incorporates Gould’s dark humor and love of monster movies.

“It was based on a very simple premise,” Gould said. “I often describe my dad as Archie Bunker without the elegance and sophistication. He’s a very kind of bullheaded, sexist, racist, misogynistic, blue-collar guy. And the premise of the show is, What if my dad was Buffy the Vampire Slayer? What if you took a guy like that … and he had to fight monsters instead of just sitting around his living room complaining about stuff? What makes the show work is not that Stan doesn’t believe in monsters — he does, he just doesn’t care.”

For all the success of his show, Gould still loves the immediacy of stand-up.

“I can think up something today and try it out on stage tonight and know if it works or not. Nothing can compare to the connection that you get with an audience, which you don’t get with long-form writing.

“I also find that very satisfying sitting down in front of a blank computer screen and creating and populating a world, and I’m incredibly lucky in that I get to make my living as a writer, but I still get to go out and do stand-up comedy, but I don’t have to go out and live on the road 40 weeks a year. I have children, I have a wife, I’m a grown- up. So I can go out every couple of weeks and perform, and I can still make my living being creative. I’m having New Year’s Eve in Hawaii. I’m a pretty lucky guy.”