Humor in Toku

[Burkion]

This topic keeps coming up, which likely isn't a surprise given the chicken freezing and late night Sentai comedies.

But I've noticed an annoying trend. A lot of people tend to think that people like me, who are annoyed with how humor in Sentai is done, just doesn't get it because of culture gaps and such. ...or that we just want a super grimdark serious business only show out of our kids shows.

I'm hear to speak...for myself effectively. But hell, others can agree if they like.

I don't mind comedy relief characters. In fact I can love the guys.

Like, let's look at the original Ultraman-one of its core members, Ide, was this eccentric inventor and weapons maker who would break the fourth wall, act silly, and generally be the comedy guy. More on this in a moment, but he was pretty much the same kind of character that guys like Don would take over for.

Or Dr. Maki for that matter. Let's face it, Dr. Maki was a comedy relief villain, up until the very end.


So that must mean that Ide annoys the crap out of me much like Don, right?

Not really.

Here's the important distinction-here's the point of the thread.

Comedy is FINE in your show-when it knows its place. If your show is otherwise a serious adventure with some comedy moments, then you stick to that.

Shoving WACKY comedy in the middle of otherwise normal or serious scenes, constantly, is what doesn't work for me.

For example.

Bulk and Skull of Power Rangers-pretty much unrepentant comedy relief characters. However, when the chips were down and **** was hitting the wall, they turned the comedy off and acted like normal people-because they're characters first.

For the way Sentai tends to do comedy, they would have been dropping their pants and making hilarious nosies while cartoon sound effects played, while Andros was about to kill Zordon.

They didn't because that'd be shitty writing.

Or, really, let's just get to the ultimate example to me.

Ide.

The original Ultraman series had some great humor through out. One or two episodes were dedicated to nothing BUT the funny. It was absurd and hilarious. Ide himself was a great character.

But the key part of that was character.

Ide was possibly also the most complicated character of the original show.

When the tragedy of a situation had to be shown-he was the face of it.

When the toll of the work was getting to him, we saw it. He didn't act goofy or silly like he did before-he got serious.

Because there's a time and a place for comedy.

Hell, Ide is truly who all characters like Don should pray to be like.

Dude was the actual hero of the show-he KILLED Zetton, the monster that beat Ultraman.


Compare this to a lot of the 'comedy' in modern Toku...

Those nerv pokes in Decade, Don being...Don, Dr. Maki and his doll, Gai in the Gavan movie, and lots of other mood wrecking, intrusive comedy scenes that pervail in a lot of Modern Toku...

I don't mind comedy. But there's a time and a place for it.

Typically not in the middle of a goddamn fight unless your show is TRYING to be a parody.

 

[145zzz]

tl;dr but I'm all for comedy in toku, but it sometimes feels forced, or really out of place.
Like Hiromu's chicken freeze for example.
It felt pretty forced and out of place last week.

 

[lazycoconut]

Let's take a look at some other earlier shows ...

Kakuranger, where Red dresses up as a baby and White's signature attack involves her turning into a giant burger. Faiz, arguably the darkest Heisei Rider series, where an Orphenoch trying to kill the hero is randomly distracted by a toy plane. JAKQ, where Big One dresses as Hitler and the bad guy is destroyed with an exploding rat. Denjiman, involving high speed chases with sharks and skeletons. So wacky comedy has always existed in Sentai and Rider, which seems to be your main complaint (if we're talking about older franchises, Metal Heroes and Ultraman have/have had their fair share of comedy, or at the very least stuff that's not intended to be funny but just looks comical now it's dated ... some of the Space Sheriffs Trilogy falls into the latter category for me.)

And, yes, there are people in the fandom who do act like comedy is a bad thing, insisting that it's "retarded" (extremely insulting) or instantly complaining about any series that threatens to have a comic tone.

 

[Wing Saber]

Comedy is necessary to filter out the seriousness. Because sometimes the series could wind-up becoming too serious or depressing. Like with W, the comedy blends well with seriousness. However with Den-O & Fourze, the comedy is needed to make the show work.

 

[Shynilyte]

@ lazycoconut: I think Burkion's main complaint is when comedy feels "forced". Basically, what 145zzz said.

 

[lazycoconut]

@ lazycoconut: I think Burkion's main complaint is when comedy feels "forced". Basically, what 145zzz said.

Fair enough ... but I think that even if we kept it at the level of older Sentai/Rider, there'd still be a lot of out-there gags in the show

 

[Lynxara]

Those nerv pokes in Decade, Don being...Don, Dr. Maki and his doll, Gai in the Gavan movie, and lots of other mood wrecking, intrusive comedy scenes that pervail in a lot of Modern Toku...

It's interesting that you point out the Ultraman character you found funny, because I think that really cuts to the heart of the issue here. The original Ultraman series aired in prime time. It was not written as a children's show. It was written as a general audience show, something entire families would watch together. Yeah, the kids probably got into it the most, but the show was expected to entertain adults on some level, too.

When tokusatsu attempts comedy and expects adults to be in the audience, it usually writes the jokes accordingly. Even if it attempts a tongue-in-cheek or satirical tone, it'll do so in a way where adults are getting the jokes where the kids just understand that things are kind of silly.

Carranger is probably a prime example of this, but I'd say almost any of the post-Jetman, pre-Megaranger shows tended to be written a similar way when they wanted to do gags. Zyuranger deals heavily in irony, Dairanger in pure farce, Kakuranger in social satire.

Where the Toei shows really change (and let's face it, everyone's complaining about the Toei shows here) is when Toei's main blocks move to Sunday morning. Sunday morning is a timeslot that is pure kidvid territory in Japan, and the emphasis on broad, non-stop comedy in the modern shows reflects this directly.

The puns and non-stop slapstick are the types of jokes that Japanese writers generally expect little Japanese kids to find funny. Other shows written to be aired in similar time slots use basically the same pacing and gags. This stuff can come off as just offensively stupid if you're not a little kid, let alone both a foreigner and not a little kid.

The earlier shows, because they knew adults were watching, would try to have the comedy rise organically either from the situation the heroes were in or the sorts of characters who surrounded the heroes. Now, because they think it's mostly very small children with very short attention spans watching, the comedy is non-stop even when that means it has to be forced.

It's a problem and, to be frank, one that's probably intractable until tastes change or Toei gets new timeslots. As long as the shows are written primarily as children's shows, then you're going to get stuff like even a show's main villain being expected to pull weight as a zany comedic character, because right comedy is what is believed to keep little eyeballs glued to TV sets.

 

[Shougo B'Stard]

I think a lot of it has to do with the "animefication" of tokusatsu, too. '70s and '80s shows would often have some slapstick comedy, but the '00s shows started to go for...things you wouldn't blink at if they were animated, but just doesn't work with a flesh and blood person. (Think of Yaguruma being smacked out of town by that one Worm or Sousuke bouncing off of a clothesline into the next town.) People acting like cartoons, that's...obviously going to be forced and unnatural.

The animefication of Sentai started with Gaoranger, which had that whole Pokemon "catch 'em all!" gimmick that just spiraled out of control from there. Rider became animeficated with Kabuto, but really went off the rails with Den-O. I think it's a shame, because one of the things that make this genre special is that it's live-action, and now so many of the shows...you can easily imagine them just being animated, Toei's tried so hard to appeal to the new generation of fans by making it seem so anime-like.

 

[lazycoconut]

I think that if Sentai's ratings don't improve soon, it's possible the show could move to another time slot. The last couple of series have still been successful commercially, so it seems to me they'd consider that approach before thinking about pulling the plug on the franchise. But that would probably not change the fact of pre-school-aged kids being the primary target audience, so it wouldn't resolve the comedy thing

 

[Solari]

Y'know, toku songs(for sentai and rider songs) in the taiko no tatsujin games are classified under the category of 'anime'..

I do agree that sometimes the comedy feels forced but I just learn to go with the flow and just enjoy it.