Yes, I have looked this up in an effort to understand it.
Impressions:
Big shock here, but man who cannot stand reaction-style humor does not enjoy reaction-style anime comedy. You can no doubt hear most of these screenshots just by looking at them, and while it is exceptionally well animated, with the occasional more visual-oriented gag, such as the slow motion cork pop, probably 20 out of the 22 minutes are either coming down from someone yelling an overreaction or simply setting up and preparing to yell an overreaction. Any fun from especially fluid animation and a relatively unique style is quite literally drowned out by nonstop yelling. Absurd things happening is not the joke. The reaction is the joke, and the more overblown, the more extreme, the more speedlines, the louder the reaction is, the funnier it is. Apparently. I’m guessing here, because I have the same visceral reaction to it as I do to ads for Minions or Rabbids where they suddenly go BWAAAAAAAAAAGH. And this is another vignette style show where it jumps randomly from one to the next, so it has all the cohesion of just watching a clips montage of “this week’s most hilarious Tik Toks.” Where every joke is yelling. So there’s nothing but the jokes. Or what they’re trying to pass off as them.
I genuinely wonder if it’s covid that supercharged this to be the superdominant form of anime comedy. Yelling reactions has always been a staple, but there were still lots of things that just had fun sight gags in passing, or flat out absurdism like Excel Saga. Often both. The entire reaction-as-comedy thing I’m fairly certain comes from reality shows where they torture some person or make them taste all the appliances in the room to figure out which is chocolate so they can overreact. We all know the clips. Kind of like a crueller, one man manzai. But covid absolutely murdered that entire part of the variety show industry. But not for anime. For a year and a half, anime was the only place to go for that. Sorry Tetsuro Degawa. Or maybe it’s just the lowest form of comedy, same as Minions going BWAAAAAGH. You don’t need to come up with a joke, a funny story, a clever pun, cutting wordplay, or snark. Just yell BWAAAAAAAAAGH and you’re a comedy genius.
