Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Don't I Find Anime Comedies Funny?
|
Goto page Previous 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Next Note: this is the discussion thread for this article |
| Author | Message | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
AKS-Jack
 Posts: 14 |
|
|||||||||||||
That, Astro Fighter Sunred, and Ouran Host Club.
"If the truth is a harsh mistress, then a lie is a nice girl". I think someone needs to go tell Wataru Watari what "Hikki" sounds like in English. It's a Yukinoshita insult that practically writes itself. |
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
the green death
Posts: 128 |
|
|||||||||||||
|
I'm surprised more people haven't mentioned Kill la Kill I thought that show was hilarious and blended parody and slapstick along with character generated humor really well. It took me an episode to get used to how loud it is.
That and Ranma and Chi's Sweet Home are also favorites. I think I prefer the dub with Ranma, which is rare. Chi is funny but it's also super cute. There's a humor that arises from cuteness that I feel is done well in anime and manga. |
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
mangamuscle
Posts: 2658 Location: Mexico |
|
|||||||||||||
I would not say that I am anti-hollywood, i.e. I have Pacific Rim in blu-ray (it is not a copy :-p ) But I will admit that for me lately hollywood has lost its shine, this year I have only gone to the movie theaters once (and it is within walking distance) and have not seen even one new live-action TV series, maybe if they do the rumored Hulk adaption by guillermo del toro then they will drag me back, or maybe the new Star Trek series will do the trick. But comedies would need to get rid of laugh tracks and that will probably not happen on the foreseen future, Meanwhile Yuru Yuri s3 keeps my funny bone warm 
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
animalia555
Posts: 467 |
|
|||||||||||||
|
I have no problem with Hollywood, even Hollywood comedies, i love Meet The Parents for example, but Adam Sandler has never been, and probably never will be funny.
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
enurtsol
 Posts: 14761 |
|
|||||||||||||
|
Much anime nowadays revolve around sexual humor.
If you're into other types of humor, ya won't find much anime funny. |
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
Daniel Dormer
Posts: 13 |
|
|||||||||||||
|
Prison school was one of the rare animes that I watched and it was just pure comedy
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
icetea00
 Posts: 50 |
|
|||||||||||||
I don't mind sexual humor at all in fact. But I would like to add that most of anime's sexual humor are the type probably made for teenagers or otaku without much experience with women, and who are somewhat sexually repressed either by their parents or other social situations. Otherwise I can't think of any other reason why they watch this type of anime as an outlet for their repression. That said, I did try to accept it for what it is while enjoying anime. But that gets really tiring. That's the reason why I don't enjoy most anime. I agree that anime usually lacks adult situation type of humor (Japanese live-action TV dramas on the other hand are more likely to have that - you can see why). Then again, adult situation of humor is probably not made for the target audience. I did enjoy Welcome to the NHK but I don't treat it as a comedy show. This type is rare in anime, as we all know. The only one comedy show I really find funny is Daily Lives of Highschool Boys. I am one who doesn't find most anime funny. I am still watching them because I am OK with anime with some mildly amusing characters (will be even better if they are voiced by seiyuu I like) and without too many tiring tropes. Super Seisyun Brothers is a show I recently finished. I admit that it is also guilty of the hit or miss otaku/fujoshi humor. I like it only because I like the characters. I can tolerate the exaggeration, which is the norm in anime after all. I don't watch anime to look for comedy at all and don't even expect that most of the time. I dropped most of the comedy shows mentioned by users above, especially those with student council/club and harem. I even dropped Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun after a few episodes and found it boring. |
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
Shadowrun20XX
 Posts: 1935 Location: Vegas |
|
|||||||||||||
|
Sure it's subjective but its also cold logic that if you have no idea about another culture, the jokes will completely go over your head.
There is a reason why seasoned fans stick around. If you compare what America finds funny and what Japan finds funny, "you're going to have a bad time". Why any of us have to explain this is even more hilarious. 
Gintama is a mix of ribald mix of shonen jump tomfoolery and Sayonara zetsubou sensei was hilarious and recently Teekyu has been entertaining. Series like Lucky Star, Hi☆sCoool! SeHa Girls and DD Hokuto no Ken I'm sure are horrible for anyone new to anime. Especially all the hardcore "Otaku" that only know what adult swim and cartoon network have shown. Crunchyroll must be intimidating. 
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
enurtsol
Posts: 14761 |
|
|||||||||||||
Yeah, same thing when Hollywood sitcoms at one point were all satire. When everything's pretty much one type of humor, ya kinda stop laughing after awhile or maybe even groan. Also not inclusive to more people who are into other types of humor. |
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
Jose Cruz
 Posts: 1773 Location: South America |
|
|||||||||||||
|
I usually don't have difficulty understanding comedy from other cultures, in fact, Brazilian comedy usually is terrible and really low brown. In terms of anime, I found One Punch Man to be extremely funny, Ouran Highschool Host Club is also pretty funny as well as K-On! (Though for different reasons) and Lucky Star, although I find difficult to understand what is so funny about Gintama, a comedy that is worshipped among Western anime fans. But overall I like most Japanese comedy and I find it funnier than most American comedy which tends to be excessively grotesque and lacking in subtlety.
Japanese otaku are big Hollywood fans. Notice from blu ray sales in 2014, about 18 of the top 50 blu rays were Hollywood movies and 22 were anime. I am also a big fan of both American and Japanese popular culture. Although I find Japanese popular culture a bit stronger overall with its greater sense of theatricality and high level of aggression displayed in stuff like Berserk as well as the much more well developed comic and animation mediums. Finally, fans of anime are fans of animation and Hollywood is usually live action. There is some adult Western animation but its not a diverse and well developed medium compared to Japanese animation. Also I think that anime fans rejection of Western media comes mostly as a reaction to the rejection of non-western media by the mainstream Western society.
I watched most of the stuff you mention. I find them more grotesque than "edgy" though, its very unsubtle type of satirical humor, very typical of adult American animation and comics (specially South Park, American Dad and Family Guy). I enjoy most of it as well, specially Futurama. Anime comedies are usually more psychological and subtle, like Azumanga Daioh and K-On!, comedies that westerns usually don't get. But they are not very cultural and they are much more universal than American adult animation which is mostly satire of American pop culture. For more subtle English language animated humor, Bob and Margaret is a very good one as well as Wallace and Gromit. They are not American though.
One Punch Man is not about sexual humor. Lucky Star is not about sexual humor. K-On! Is not about sexual humor. Gintama is not sexual humor as well. The jokes in Little Witch Academia and Full Metal Alchemist are also not sexual. Azumanga Daioh is also not very sexualized. Overall I find that while there is some sexual humor it is not more common than sexual humor in the comedy from other cultures, in fact, it is less common than in some other cultures. Brazilian humor is heavily sexualized (including a lot of homophobic humor) while American humor also includes a lot of sex in it, shows like Seinfeld and Friends have a lot of sexual humor included (much more than in the aforementioned anime showd above). Comparing the humor of the 4 cultures whose media I consume in large quantities, Brazil, UK, US and Japan, I find that UK and Japanese humor is less sexualized,the most sexualized humor is Brazilian, by far. Brazil is overall much more sexualized culture than the other 3 as well and this is reflect in the humor. The sexualization of anime is extremely limited overall and I think Westerners obssess over it just because the characters in manga tend to be drawn with explicit sexual characteristics and some degree of attractiveness but the presense of sex in anime is not that prevalent as westerns think it is.
Very fallacious concepts there. First, anime are mostly manga adaptations, manga is a medium extremely diverse and about 50% of manga is adult and 40% is Shounen which can be very sophisticated as well (Full Metal Alchemist is Shounen and very sophisticated, Azumanga Daioh is a Shounen comedy, very subtle and sophisticated as well). Its is claimed that manga is more diverse than Japanese live action as well and pretty much any type of manga has been adapted into anime (see Noitamina shows to get a sense of the diversity of anime). One case of a manga satire that is a masterpiece of satire is in my opinion, One Punch Man, a brilliant satire of the superhero genre, easily superior to any Western satire I ever experienced, the humor is just so good because it satirizes the attitudes of superheroes, like making fun of the seriousness of Genos as a superhero for example. One Punch Man its a satire of the Japabese psyche in itself. Another excellent satire from 2015 is Cute Earth Defense Club, a satire of the magical girl genre. [Do not double or triple-post ~ Zalis] |
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
YotaruVegeta
 Posts: 1061 Location: New York |
|
|||||||||||||
There are quite a lot of American comics that serve as Superhero satire and/or commentary. The Boys and Watchmen are the first to mind. |
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
enurtsol
Posts: 14761 |
|
|||||||||||||
Yeah of course a handful can be named over the years, but over 40 shows are released every season! And they wouldn't be in business if otaku can't find their waifus/husbandos and their associated merchandise. And that's really where it all comes down to: the money off merchandise, which consists most of their revenues, and what's the fastest way to otaku's hearts (not thru their stomach). The Japanese production committees know what they're doing.
Not as much anymore (more and more are adaptations of LNs and VNs into late-night anime which are the purview of otaku, not mainstream manga readers - and forget about shoujo; those typically get turned into live-action now instead since otaku don't buy shoujo BDs). And the type of manga-turned-anime usually the ones can sell toys, so much of the diversity of manga is lost on anime (e.g. a lot of manga deal with adults, but most anime don't). |
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
|
|||||||||||||
|
I'd also like to point out that anime (and, to a lesser extent, manga) contains a lot of jokes that are thinly-veiled lead-ups to fanservice, like accidental removal of a girl's clothes or pervy behavior with the narrative clearly centered on the perv.
Such types of comedy definitely happens in fiction from the United States, but they are mostly restricted to sex comedies, and the man is almost always the butt of the joke. In Japanese fiction, they often are, but they also mostly get away scot-free. (An example is the main character of that Animator Expo short "Robot on the Road," who spends much of the short covertly taking photographs of the woman undressing or in the shower and posting them online, and while he's physically beaten up and later incapacitated when she finds out, at the end, he just...leaves and finds his next victim.) I am certain this is a basis (but not the only one) for anime having a reputation of having its comedy frequently mixed with its sexual content. This kind of humor, where the female is humiliated in a fanservice-y way and the male only suffers short-term punishment, would not fly in most of the Anglosphere. |
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
Jose Cruz
Posts: 1773 Location: South America |
|
|||||||||||||
I don't think the appeal of most anime is mainly to provide imaginary girlfriends/boyfriends for its fans. In my impression Anime is generally a very diverse medium and it's like film or literature in its variety. This is the sample of 2015 shows I watched so far: One Punch Man Death Parade Kancolle Yuri Kuma Arashi Keikkai Sensen UBW Sound Euphonium Cute Earth Defense Club Love Shirobako I also read but not watched 4 mangas of shows this year: Food Wars Parasyte Knights of Sidonia School Live None of the above appear to me to be mainly sexual driven, although of course there is some fanservice involved in some of them. Overall, they appear to me to be a quite diverse set of stories whose only unified characteristic is to have been animated in japan.
Novels are also a very diverse medium. And I don't think that the type of Manga turned into anime is the type that can sell toys, Parasyte and Food Wars, are Manga I read that were adapted this year are not particularly adapted for toys. Overall I don't agree with you at all, it appears to me that popular Manga tend to get adapted into Anime in general and so Anime tends to represent a cross section of the medium, with a tendency to be more Otaku centric though than manga but still to have a high level of diversity. |
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
enurtsol
Posts: 14761 |
|
|||||||||||||
Anime used to be more diverse, but there's one thing they can't get around on and that's demographics - besides the merchandise/toy-driven anime on daytime, most new anime are late-night, and they're essentially targeting the same several thousands BD buyers. That's not really that lot of people - ya can only get so much different variety out of several thousands people before ya spread yourself too thin with not enough BD buyers to remain profitable. Such anime are no longer trying to target a broad spectrum of demographics (sometimes they do break out to other demos, but that's not by intent). Kinda liken it to Adult Swim - it's late-night and targeting a specific crowd, and it's not for everybody. Until they have more demographics they can target for money, they can't help but be restricted to what demographic they already have now. Meanwhile, manga is not restricted to such small or such few demographics and still be profitable - that's how manga can afford to be so diverse. Just follow the money.
Novels are, yes. Light novels, less so. And the type of light novels that get turned into anime, even less so. It's like Hollywood films based on novels nowadays. Yes, novels are diverse, but it's the YA novels that typically get turned into films. Not just any novels get adapted into films or into anime.
It's almost always about the money - ya gotta consider where they're going to earn their money from. There's always a few that can be considered auteur or "pet projects" that they're looking to just break even, but most need to earn profits one way or another - whether from toys, merchandise, increase manga sales, etc. Rarely they can earn them from TV ratings or video sales alone. Most manga only sell in the several thousands, not the small portion of manga that sell in the hundreds of thousands - those are from the few high-selling magazine anthologies. What makes manga so diverse is from those many more manga that sell only in the several thousands, but those are the kind of manga that don't sell enough to be turned into anime since anime are much more expensive to produce than manga. Much of that diversity of manga are lost on anime. |
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group