Quote:
Originally Posted by Triple_R
I never really got into Gintama (honestly, the main reason why is that its length at this point is daunting to me  ), but from what I did check out, I did feel that its comedy quality really is a cut or two above. Gintama has a great sense of humor, and it just "gets" comedy in a more well-rounded way than a lot of other anime comedy shows do, imo. |
Speaking of comedy, I used the graph function with MAL and found that apparently among my least favorite genres in anime is comedy and I think I know why. The problem is that when it comes to Japanese comedy styles they are typically extremely limited to a select subset of gags. Foremost among these has to be the Manzai comedy duo style which seemingly utterly dominates the comedy scene in Japan and thus has obvious influences that can be seen in a lot of anime gag comedy. It gets old after a while though because the basic premise never really changes from somebody says something stupid and then gets slapped around for it and called a fool.
Then of course the other style I see a lot is the otaku reference one where you pretty much have to be familiar with the niconico and 2ch cultures to even get half the jokes and the other half requires you to be versed in anime culture. This style tends to be really repetitive and borderline predictable too IMO. I doubt it would kill writers if they no longer used the whole sudden switch to 2D Dragon Quest style gag.
The other common style is word play and puns which I won't even get into why this is a problem for your average English-speaking anime fan.
And lastly the other common style I see a lot is what some might call pantsu comedy, where the joke is simply that somebody stumbles into a room with a naked girl and something contrived happens that causes him to awkwardly fall on top of her possibly grabbing a breast or two, he gets embarrassed and then she slaps him and calls him a pervert. I doubt anybody is keeping track of how many times they've seen this bit over the years.
Now I think where a lot of comedy shows that Sunrise has done differs is that they often tend to follow a more western style approach of finding the humor in every day life (observational humour), which is a relateable style to both Western and Japanese fans and opens the door to more experimentation with different types of gags, jokes and witticisms than we're normally used to seeing. I think that's a big part of the reason why shows like Gintama and Daily Lives of High School boys stand out so much to people.