Uncovering Joshiraku Transcript

Original Video: https://youtu.be/cxiDzBXIPaE

A joke delivered to an audience that doesn't laugh, a generically zany opening with cute girls and dancing, before we cut to the changing room, where a conversation beings on...the merits of adapting a dialogue heavy show taking place in a single location, before calling the very idea of 'normal conversation' into question.

In calling so much attention to its existence, Joshiraku is starting a conversation with itself, spoken through its cast of characters for one purpose: comedy. And much like the title of this video, it's something of a misleading show. I mean, the girls look cute, certainly but that's about where their cuteness ends. ...Okay, she's the normal one. Yet even Tetora fails to be cute in a traditional sense, as her godly luck is neither admirable or reprehensible, serving as a trait that makes her neither more or less cute. She's bizarrely normal.

But though their uncut lack of cuteness is ever present in the kooky conversations and convoluted trains of logic that lead to the lackadaisical looniness, the show is also sure to strip them down, certain to show a little skin. It happens almost every episode, as if it's preempting you. Shouting, 'this is what you're really here for, isn't it! ISN'T IT!?' But since the cuteness of the girls is primarily in the designs, they aren't particularly sexy. So no, it isn't really what I want. NO.

But...what do I want? Why am I watching this cute girl show without cute girls, said girls being rakugo performers who never give a full rakugo performance? Each episode is divided into three parts, starting and ending with the weirdness wholly hinged to the changing room in the rakugo theater. Another world in and of itself, rules bending at a whim for the sake of a joke or gag. But there's a separation between work and pleasure. Most of these bits start with one of the girls ending a performance, and since we only get the punchline, these jokes always fall flat. And the audience generally agrees, as not once in the show do they actually laugh, their only sounds being a polite smattering of applause. The middle segments of the show go even further away from the show's backdrop, as the girls visit various tourism spots. The conversations are dumb as ever, but the tone is a bit more laid back, the slipping of their more traditional antics attracting undue attention, meaning they have to be on their best behavior. It's something of a 'do-nothing show', but the fact that the work we never see is rakugo carries a biting irony with it because the girls are funny everywhere but the stage. Rakugo is a dying comedy form, and the characters have enough of an interest in it to bring it up on occasion, but by and large it's negligible. To actually focus on the rakugo would be even more pointless then watching the girls do nothing, because they're way funnier behind closed doors than they are in routine. Maybe if they could bring their weird wordplay and wacky wayside whimsey to the world through the stage then rakugo wouldn't be so damn dead.

But perhaps the international world isn't ready for the humor of Joshiraku? Much of it is very absurdist, between meta memery, cultural observations and commentary, savage slapstick, ludicrous logical leaps, and most awkward for the western anime fanbase: unfamiliar references and unplacable puns. Back when it first aired, the fansubbing group only took it on as a personal challenge at a time when no one else was translating it almost five years ago. Reference humor is something, of course, commented on in the show itself, because it is often awkward.

But for all its commentary on cute girls and cute things, it's not really saying anything. They never are saying anything, no matter the subject, because while there's an element of parody to it, while it questions its own existence, though the characters are generally uncute, it's still trying to be funny, and doesn't end up straying far from the genre because it still understands the general appeal. It's not in the cuteness of the girls or the cuteness of the things, otherwise every show would be just as popular as any other. It's in the chemistry and interactions, and the bizarre humor doesn't put a damper on the consistent characterization, and though the ways they play off each other might not always result in a barrel of perfectly exportable laughs, many of the dumb discussions are able to transcend beyond that, as even when I'm not laughing, these dumbass girls usually have me smiling anyway.

Uncovering is a series in which I analytically review something that has yet to get much good coverage in the way of analytical analysis. Joshiraku, for instance has...two reviews! En espanol! But now that I'm done with my little nostalgia trip, if you have a show, movie, or OVA that has little to no coverage, let me know and maybe I'll give it a look. EVENTUALLY.