Summer 2022 First Impressions – Teppen!! Laughing ’til You Cry

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: TBA

Source: Manga

Episode Summary: After winning a regional manzai comedy competition, the manzai trio Young WaiWai is asked to move into a dorm specifically for national manzai competitors. There, they join other regional groups, each with their own aesthetics and schtick – some are wealthy, others pretend(?) to believe in aliens. Here, they all practice their routines in order to prepare for competition – and to make their audiences laugh.

Young WaiWai turns a semi-autobiographical occurrence into a routine, describing a very unusual case of a broken bodybuilding trophy and the location of its missing head. While they try to hide the situation from the owner of the dorm (the winner of the trophy who’s extremely proud of it), they walk back through a series of truly silly events to discover the true culprit.

Impressions: Something I often try to remind folks of here is that comedy is one of the more subjective genres in entertainment. Comedy requires not only a certain set of experiences to grasp, but also in some cases a tolerance for watching physical harm take place. It’s also so often heavily reliant on cultural aptitude to the point that for those with less experience in the culture, it can be almost impenetrable.

On its face, manzai comedy – which typically involves comical storytelling between two individuals playing the roles of the “straight man” and the “idiot” – seems like it would be a decent entry point for many folks. On the surface, its focus on comical misunderstandings and the blatant stupidity of one of the characters would make sense even if some of the specific details didn’t. In practice, however, misunderstandings rely a lot on puns, rhymes in the native language, and very specific, familiar circumstances, all which can be difficult to grasp for outsiders.

I say this because watching this episode left me feeling as though I was a little “out-to-sea,” and I have Japanese language and cultural experience to a level that’s probably slightly higher than a typical viewer (not meant to be a brag, just a fact). This isn’t really a criticism of the series, because storytellers don’t owe anyone universal appeal. But I do think that this would be a tough nut to crack for many folks, and something that really can’t be entirely offset by some of the episode’s more visual humor.

I think it’s possible to look past this hurdle and enjoy the series on its other merits. There are a lot of fun characters, and if you enjoy fast-talking then, well, there’s a lot of that here. Personally, though, I found my interest flagging part way through, because for as much as I feel like I can appreciate that different styles of entertainment exist, I admittedly just don’t always have the tools or desire to enjoy them.

Pros: The way that the “mystery” in this episode resolves is funny – maybe not in a laugh-out-loud kind of way, but I can appreciate the sheer wackiness of it as a resolution.

I also appreciate the specific focus on one of the characters’ younger twin sisters using various dolls and action figures to play “house.” When I was a kid, my Barbies naturally went on adventures with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, so that definitely rings true to me.

Cons: This episode does what many series with large casts tend to do, which is to introduce all of the characters within a ten minute span. I understand that this information isn’t necessarily meant to “stick” immediately and that most of the characters will likely get their own focus as the series goes on. That being the case, however, I wish the introductions would happen more organically as they become necessary, rather than showing each character for fifteen seconds with their name on screen.

Content Warnings: Mild slapstick.

Would I Watch More? – I kind of wonder if this episode is atypical for the kind of stories we’ll get going forward. After watching this episode and feeling very confused I went and looked up some other descriptions of the series and they seem to focus more on the relationship between the characters in Young WaiWai. That said, my desire to watch more and find out isn’t very high.