It didn’t start well. Puns never do. Then it got a little obnoxiously self-referential for a little too long before that somehow segued into talking about casual clothes which was most of the rest of the episode, along with about a seven minute aside into dogs and then cursing at the ocean. It is a bit heavily reliant on understanding the Japanese language for a lot of its jokes though, so I’m not sure how much of the humor will translate. Regardless of that, the best jokes were probably the truly truly horrible ones. The puns that everybody realizes were awful and just stops to wait for how bad they were to sink in before a collective groan. The *loli types conversation did make me laugh too, but a lot of the humor isn’t quite as snappy and does suffer a little bit for it.
Thankfully, it doesn’t scream all the jokes at you, visually or auditorially, and just proceeds seamlessly from one to the next. Kudos to the director there for keeping things flowing at a good pace for humor. The visuals were a little uneven though, and I really mean uneven, not just bad. It did feel like it got better as the episode went along, which is unusual in and of itself and I’m not sure what to make of it. There’s not much to say about the characters. They serve their parts and obviously are not meant to be much of anything but mouthpieces. I would prefer if they cut the actual rakugo/pure stand-up bits out though as both of them were pretty awful, but not quite to the same level of the awkward horrible joke level.
I laughed more than a few times at least, so that puts it above most of the rest of the shows today. A lot of the better jokes were pretty lingual though, so I’m not sure how well it’ll carry over for the subtitle crowd. I also have absolutely no idea what there’ll be to say about it weekly if I do keep following along. Hm…
