GINTAMA - Mr. Ginpachi's Zany Class

Episode 4

My biggest hope for this show was that it would find better ways of utilizing its premise rather than leaning solely on meta humor. To its credit, this episode does sort of address that by spoofing on one of the go-to plots of any Japanese school setting: The Seven School Wonders. With how good Gintama usually is at riffing on other stories, this seemed like it should have been a slam dunk in the comedy department, but in execution, this was probably the least funny episode of the show yet.

The basic setup here is very simple. Mr. Ginpachi, Shinpachi, and Kagura conveniently forget their stuff at school and try to sneak into it at night to retrieve it. Standing in their way are the Seven Wonders of Gintama High School, but when they actually come face to face with these ghoulish horrors, they turn out to be something more mundane, and by mundane, I mean the wacky gimmicks of whichever Gintama character they happen to run into. Creepy wailing coming from the staff room just turns out to be Zenzo applying some ointment for his hemorrhoids, while strange rattling sounds coming from one of the classrooms at night turn out to be Kondo burying his face into Otae's chair like the stalker he is. This…is more or less the entire joke, and these are the two most elaborate uses of it in the entire episode. The rest are literally just quick flashes of our main trio reacting to how weird the other characters are, and none of them are particularly funny. Few gags feel lazier than simply pointing at a wacky thing and expecting laughs without any buildup, and seeing the cast being further reduced to their personality quirks really makes it feel like the anime staff doesn't know what else to do with them in the context of a spin-off.

Ironically, the closest this episode came to making me laugh was the section that was trying the least hard to be funny. When the main trio tries to track down the last of the Seven Wonders, they instead run into a boy attempting to jump off the roof due to the amount of pressure he's facing from flunking his tests. While they do try their best to talk him out of it, they're also quick to point out how cliché of a trope this is for a school setting, and that mix of comedy and drama is the closest this show has come to actually feeling like Gintama. I connected with how Mr. Ginpachi's way of successfully convincing the kid to live was pointing out all the new JUMP stories he'd get to enjoy if he just tried to keep living. While it seems a bit silly on paper, sometimes having good media to look forward to can be a genuinely helpful motivator when you're having a bad time and need a good form of escape, so it's nice to see that being treated as valuable.

Sadly, even that moment of sincerity doesn't change how simplistic the conflict here is. I liked the earlier joke of Mr. Ginpachi trying to use reverse psychology to talk the kid out of jumping, only to make him more willing to do it. I wouldn't exactly call it a great one compared to Gintama's usual standards. Even the final punchline of the kid turning out to actually be a ghost felt a bit too predictable, and while it wasn't inherently unfunny, it also didn't feel particularly inspired. It feels weird to come down this hard on literally any Gintama related media when it comes to comedy, but even the weakest Gintama episodes usually have a few solid jokes, and nothing here really hit for me. I'm really hoping that this is just a singular case of a weak episode rather than a sign of how the rest of this spinoff could look, but it's left me feeling a bit less optimistic about the future of this show than I'd prefer to be

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GINTAMA - Mr. Ginpachi's Zany Class is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.