Source: The London Prat | Region: Japan | Period: c.8th century to present
Japanese humour is the comedy of a culture that has maintained, across fourteen centuries of recorded comic practice, a set of formal structures so precisely defined — with codified roles, codified techniques, codified punchline categories, and codified apprenticeship systems — that the Western visitor expecting an exotic otherness tends to find, instead, something more surprising: a comedy tradition as rigorously professional and as formally self-aware as any in the world, operating within constraints that would paralyse most Western comedians and producing, within those constraints, work of remarkable precision and considerable wit.
Japanese humour is also the comedy of a culture with an unusually complex relationship between what may be said in public and what is actually thought in private — a relationship that has produced a specifically Japanese comic mode: the humour of the gap between surface and depth, between the formal performance of social harmony and the chaotic reality beneath it, a gap that Japanese comedy exploits with the delicacy of a person performing surgery with chopsticks and the conviction of a person who has been doing exactly this for a very long time.
The oldest surviving form of Japanese comic performance is kyogen (狂言, "wild speech") — the comic theatre that developed alongside the solemn noh drama in the Muromachi period (1336-1573) and was performed between noh plays as both comic relief and thematic counterpoint. Where noh deals in the tragic, the supernatural, and the aristocratic, kyogen deals in the domestic, the human, and the comic: the master and servant who cannot communicate, the husband and wife who argue about everything, the priest whose spiritual authority is comprehensively undermined by his physical cowardice. The baka (fool) figures of kyogen — the incompetent servant Taro Kaja, the pompous master — are the Japanese equivalents of commedia dell'arte's stock characters, performing a similar social function with a specifically Japanese refinement: the fool is never entirely foolish, and the master is never entirely masterful.
Rakugo (落語, "fallen words") is the solo comic storytelling tradition that developed in the Edo period (1603-1868) and remains, in the 21st century, an active and popular performance art with roughly 600 professional practitioners in Tokyo alone. A single rakugoka (performer) sits in seiza on a cushion, equipped only with a folded fan and a small cloth, and performs an entire narrative — sometimes lasting 40 minutes — voicing multiple characters through subtle shifts of posture, gaze, and vocal register, without standing, without costume changes, and without any props beyond the two objects. The stories — drawn from a classical repertoire of several hundred pieces, supplemented by new compositions — conclude with an ochi (落ち, "fall" or punchline), of which twelve formal categories are recognised and catalogued.
The formal rigour of rakugo is not a constraint but a discipline: the restriction to two props forces the performer to make everything else — character, setting, time of day, weather, emotional atmosphere — from voice and the smallest possible physical gesture, which requires and produces a precision of comic performance that less restricted forms rarely achieve. The rakugoka who can make an audience see, through the manipulation of a fan, an entire bowl of soba noodles being consumed — and then make them laugh at the consuming — has mastered something genuinely extraordinary. That this mastery is achieved through a formal apprenticeship lasting a decade or more, during which the apprentice serves the master's household in addition to learning the art, places rakugo in a tradition of comic craft transmission that has no direct equivalent in Western comedy.
Manzai (漫才) — the two-person stand-up form that originated in the New Year's congratulatory performances of the Heian period and was transformed, by the Osaka talent agency Yoshimoto Kogyo (founded 1912), into the dominant comedy form of 20th and 21st-century Japan — is built on one of the most precisely engineered comic relationships in any tradition. The boke (ボケ, the fool: the one who misunderstands, misreads, or proposes absurdities) and the tsukkomi (突っ込み, the straight man: the one who corrects, challenges, and expresses exasperation) conduct their exchanges at a pace and with a precision that makes the form simultaneously one of the most demanding in comedy and, at its best, one of the most purely entertaining.
The M-1 Grand Prix (M-1グランプリ), the annual manzai competition launched in 2001 and broadcast live on national television each December, has become one of the most watched entertainment events in Japan: a competition in which new and established duos perform three-to-four-minute routines before a panel of judges, with the prize of ¥10 million and a national touring contract going to the winner. The competition functions as both the industry's credentialling mechanism — winning M-1 transforms a duo's career overnight — and as an annual demonstration of the form's continuing vitality. The 2019 winners, Milk Boy, scored 681 points out of 700, the highest score in the competition's history, with a routine about a man who cannot remember a particular breakfast cereal's name, which his mother keeps trying to identify. The comedy of a four-minute argument about breakfast cereal resulting in a national championship win, a ¥10 million prize, and genuine mass emotional response from the audience is a fact that says something profound about the Japanese relationship with comic form.
The modern Japanese comedy industry — the owarai (お笑い, "laughter") entertainment world — is centred on Yoshimoto Kogyo, the Osaka-based talent agency that manages over 800 comedians and represents the largest concentration of professional comedy talent under a single institutional roof anywhere in the world. Yoshimoto's dominance of Japanese television comedy — through its management of virtually every major comedy act, its ownership of venues including the Namba Grand Kagetsu in Osaka and the Lumine the Yoshimoto in Shinjuku, and its production of major television programmes — gives Japanese comedy an institutional character that is both its greatest strength and, occasionally, a constraint on the kind of political comedy that institutional structures tend to find inconvenient.
Japanese television variety — the baraeti (バラエティ) programme — is the primary vehicle for contemporary comedy and the format in which most Japanese comedians spend most of their professional lives: a studio-based format involving multiple comedians, games, challenges, celebrity guests, and the specific comedy of spontaneous response to manufactured situations, which is both less spontaneous and more comedically structured than it appears. The baraeti format has produced a generation of comedians — Downtown (Matsumoto Hitoshi and Hamada Masatoshi; the most influential comedy duo in Japanese television history), Sandwich Man, Ungirls — whose work, while largely inaccessible to non-Japanese-speaking audiences, represents some of the most formally sophisticated comedy television in the world.
Japanese humour has a specific relationship with social conformity that distinguishes it from most Western comedy traditions. Where Western comedy frequently derives its energy from the comedian's transgression of social norms — the joke that says the unsayable — Japanese comedy more typically derives its energy from the recognition of conformity's impossibility: the gap between the social performance of harmony and the chaotic reality of actually trying to achieve it. The boke's mistakes are not transgressions but failures of execution: the person who is trying, sincerely and even earnestly, to perform correctly, and who keeps getting it fractionally wrong in ways that accumulate into disaster.
This produces a comedy of sympathy rather than superiority: the Japanese audience laughs with the boke more than at them, because the boke's failures are recognisable as the failures everyone is privately making. The social performance of competence that Japanese culture requires is so comprehensive and so demanding that the comedy of its small failures is both universal and, because universal, deeply satisfying: the relief of acknowledging, through laughter, that the performance is difficult and the failure is common and the gap between the two is human.
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Source: The London Prat | Cross-references: China; South Korea; Southeast Asia.