I have a confession to make: I often decide what anime to start watching based on gifs I come across on Tumblr. Which is how I came to watch Plastic Nee-san (Plastic Big Sister).
With thanks to Evangelikon for the gif.
It would be futile to try and explain the context to the gif and largely irrelevant as it’s twenty seven minutes of utter, anarchic madness. I commented immediately after seeing it that it was created by glorious lunatics. Twelve bite-size “episodes” of surreal humour that, like the mini-games in the Wario-ware Nintendo games, don’t stick around long enough for the humour to come off the boil. Ostensibly it’s about the day-to-day lives of three members of the plastic model making club, yet in reality that only comprises a few minutes of the show before the delightfully twisted school shenanigans takes over, leaving the only remnant of the title: the toy models each of the three main girls wear on their heads. It’s the type of show that screenshots and to a lesser extent gifs don’t do justice and it’s only in full, chaotic motion that it really shines; it’s also a reminder of how fickle humour can be.
It’s hard writing about humour because it is so personal and at its core, as John Cleese succinctly describes in a talk on creativity, lies in the disjoint between the expected result and the actual result. What you expect is largely based upon your experiences, so when I came to watching Binbougami ga! (The God of Poverty / Good Luck Girl!) during one of my anime watching lulls, the first episode’s early crack about Ichiko’s chest size caused me to turn off the series entirely. My expectation was that it would be just another collection lascivious situations that were bad taste at best or lead balloons at worst. What I didn’t expect, after perseverance, was a fresh story, a whole heap of sight gags and a pleasing lack of pretension when it came to the story of a girl with boundless good fortune facing off against Momiji, the titular God of Poverty.
At thirteen episodes of twenty four minutes each, it’s obvious that Binbougami ga! can’t be funny 100% of the time. As a television serial it needs a connecting thread, be that an overarching story or general character progression to maintain interest, even just for that relatively short runtime. Compare that with Excel Saga which ran for twenty six episodes and has the same kind of deranged, hyper-aware cultural perception but with all that time to use eventually devolved into protracted surrealism, stretching the limits of patience and, in some places, mental stability. Going the other way with runtime though and you end up with something like Aiura which sits somewhere in the expansive “light comedy” pigeon hole, but with episodes spanning only four minutes (one of that filled with a crabtastic opening theme, there aren’t even any crabs in the show…), like Plastic Nee-san, nothing sticks around long enough to be too abrasive. So the story of three classmates and their day-to-day lives can act as a entree, fun to snack on and easily digested.
Binbougami ga! also demonstrates comedy’s power through juxtaposition to tackle topics that would bog down or otherwise entirely consume other show structures. So between all of the jabs at Death Note, One Piece and Lupin III is the story of a girl whose power of good fortune naturally brings bad luck to those she knows, isolating her and letting her own childhood fears reverberate in her head, magnified by time and loneliness. It’s potent stuff and reminiscent of Lucky Star’s episode with Konata’s mother - there’s emotion and an obvious message but it’s offset by the peculiar reality the show peddles.
With the exception of perhaps Excel Saga, all of the series mentioned so far specifically construct circumstances to exhibit their humour which is in contrast to when the humour is intrinsic the circumstance itself. So it is with Koe de Oshigoto (Working With Voice) which peeks into the world of voice acting for Japanese erotic games. It’s an absurd setup that provides a rich vein for comedy to fall out of, but contrast it with the “funny things happen to regular high school girls” and the difference in plain. The series follows sixteen year old Kanna as she is coerced by her shameless sister into voicing different ero-games and the… situations that this causes and complicates. It has more cringeworthy moments than perhaps any other comedy series I’ve seen but is hilarious precisely because it strays so close to that personal line of “too much”. It’s that line that turns rude jokes from humour to wretchedness as was the case with Nourin that within two episodes elicited nothing but a weary sigh from me.
That’s possibly why the previously mentioned “light comedy” strain of shows exists - aiming for a blend of story and humour that is as inoffensive as possible. It’s a risk because it threatens to neuter the comedy for being too “safe” and lacking the bite of a story that would otherwise overshadow it, resulting in what many would consider a “throw away” show. It happened with Love Lab - a story about the unlikely friendship between an all-girls school princess and tomboy - which, regardless of the mild sapphic overtones, has a couple of stand-out moments and is generally a pleasant watch but otherwise forgettable. Mayo Chiki on the other hand is memorable for all the wrong reasons - a penultimate episode confession and a series-long sadistic streak the main culprits - but falls too far into the harem/romance spiral that many light comedy shows use to justify themselves. Even the concept of a gynophobe discovering a supposedly male butler is in fact female is a little threadbare with obvious school hijinks replaced by the tiresome faux-nobility snottiness of the butler’s mistress, Kanade.
No matter how much you pattern match it, there is no one universal or personal trick for comedy; so while I found Plastic Nee-san and Koe de Oshigoto laugh out loud hilarious, they could just as well wrest nothing more than stony silence from you. It’s enough then that they exist and experiments are still being undertaken and not lost in a sea of mediocrity, proving that if you’re not already too jaded and cynical, exploring them is worthwhile if not just to craft where your own sweet spot for comedy lies.