Am I alone in the fact that I just can't stand anime humor? I love all kinds of anime, from action to drama...

Am I alone in the fact that I just can't stand anime humor? I love all kinds of anime, from action to drama, but whenever they try to be funny, I just can't help but cringe. And when they try too hard or too often, I just gotta' turn that shit off. It sucks, cuz there are some shows that have great art direction and/or a really interesting underlying plot, but the silly, wacky, japanese-desu jokes kill the whole thing. It ruined FLCL for me, and I could never finish Fullmetal Alchemist because of its bipolar swings between telling a story and telling shitty jokes.

Japanese humour is certainly different from western humour but I think the more exposure to anime you have the more you get used to it and begin to appreciate it for what it is. It doesn't help that the jokes you are getting are often being retold by the translator or the english voice cast and sometimes completely changed because the Japanese joke doesn't translate.

>Am I alone in the fact that I just can't stand anime humor?
Where do you think you are? People on here make it a full time job not getting the Japanese humor in anime.

Nip culture simply can't grasp show don't tell
You build resistence after a good 3 years don't worry

helps if you actually watch japanese films as well

Bad japanese humor is part of the charm

Watch Nourin.

Asian humor in general is weird. Variety shows sometimes just don't translate well at all. Owarai type stuff is also very hard for Westerners to get into

yeah, anime humor is often very childish and not subtle in the slightest. probably has something to do with their overly strict/autistic culture.

Japanese humour is usually at it's best when they're playing something bizarre totally straight.

Like an adventure or something

Your understanding of it seems naive. You've put it into this one big bucket called "humor" and judged it as bad. There are tons of different types of humor, some that nips are good at, some that nips are bad at, and a healthy number of exceptions to both those groups.

The main thing that nips are bad at is jokes. Anything jokey, anything that is sort of a traditional, old-fashioned comedy. They're not gonna write seinfeld, that's just not in the cards. First you've got the language barrier, which is obviously problematic. Second, you've got the fairly novice, almost prototypical state of development in nip comedy writing (puns, puns, and more puns). Then, of course, you have the target market. You have to keep in mind that so many of these shows are written for troglodytes. So the results are god-awful ecchi humor, the intent of which just seems to be that things that are sexual in nature are somehow funny, characters just yelling really loud which is somehow supposed to make things funny, or puns, puns, and more puns.

The categories which anime does a better job in are things like slapstick (when used with a measured hand), sight gags, and character humor. In case "character humor" needs to be unpacked a bit, I'll describe it here. Character humor is a type of comedy wherein the interactions between characters is what makes you laugh, what the dialog means to the characters, not just the words themselves. This is when you know a character so you know what the words mean to them and that makes it funny. It's not a build-up to some jokey punchline, it's a situational humor. Like when Mugi wants to be slapped around in order to feel more like one of the boys so she steals Mio's strawberry but Mio just starts crying. There are a lot of different comedic elements going on in the scene, but the core of the comedy is who the characters are (I'm not saying this is a fantastic example of riotous comedy, but it's an effective one in this case).

It's not that they're bad at it, it's just tailored for a culture that has a very different sense of humor

It takes time to get the mindset and it's not for everyone, but it can be funny as hell.

Though I will accept that FM:A was quite weak on the humour front.

Nichijou a classic.

To continue, character humor doesn't rely as much on complex irony, great comedic timing, or clever wordplay, and as such it's generally not AS funny as a well-written skit. It's not usually laugh-out-loud funny, but it can be used to consistently maintain a sort of low-rpm charming funny throughout a series, and the fact that it's commingled with reinforcing the characterization has sort of a synergistic effect. You're more likely to give a joke which is a bit off-the-mark a pass if you think it works well for the character.

So I'd argue that best case scenario you have plenty of character-based humor with a little bit of slapstick and a healthy dose of visual gags. Anime is probably a better medium for visual gags than live action, and there are shows which do them very well. Strong character comedy rarely results in real out loud laughs, but sort of a blurry malaise of entertained feeling. You just kind of have a smile on your face throughout. That's usually the best I can hope for. On or two actual laughs per cour, but smiling a lot. I can think of a couple shows where I laughed out loud like once per episode.

There's definitely truth to this, but I'd argue that's not all that's going on.

Japan has been aping western culture for like a hundred years now, and while they've managed to just about reach or even arguably outpace the US in many areas, comedy is just not one of them. I honestly think that the language is the limiting factor, and that it's the same limiting factor which causes them to lag behind in literary achievement as well. The language just isn't great at expressing a wide range of abstract concepts. I think this is why Japanese culture has always sort of gravitated more toward visual mediums, and actions taking the place of words. It certainly has strengths as well as weaknesses, though, for example the limited nature of the actual words in use puts a huge amount of importance on context, leading to a lot of sort of free association type exercises (hence puns) which is really interesting from a sociological linguistics kind of point of view.

I would be more inclined to outright agree if it weren't the case that contemporary Japanese comedy just looks western comedy from two or three decades ago.

I think anime comedy tends to work whenever the quality of the drawing is on the low tier.

>shouting why what just happened was funny
Such unrefined humor

It depends on the anime in question for me. I find some of them downright hilarious, other just feel cringey. But I do have to admit that I mainly started enjoying the humor when I learned more about the culture and some of the language itself. You just can't separate these things.

What I can't stand is the non-stop screaming.

>WHAT YOU JUST DID WAS INCORRECT/RUDE/VERY INAPPROPRIATE FOR THE CURRENT SITUATION! I MUST HIGHLIGHT AND CORRECT SUCH ABERRANT BEHAVIOR, FORTHWITH!! WHATEVER SHALL THE EMPEROR THINK OF THIS TOMFOOLERY?!!

I agree, but I don't like western humor either. There is anyway some rare case where I enjoy Japanese anime comedy, while that never happens for western cartoons.

So what kind of comedy do you enjoy?

My life is nowhere near ideal but I'm glad I can actually enjoy things

I'd probably have killed myself by now if I could make such blanket statements as "I hate all comedy" and have them be 100% serious

I've never understood the disconnect people have with non-comedy anime injecting bits of humor

I mean, I can understand not thinking it's funny, but even the most obtuse shit is usually equivalent to typical hollywood quips in usage.
Saying you can't finish watching something because it's not 100% serioux busineaux all the time just makes it sound like you have brain problems

Also the dick jokes in FLCL are part of the plot

Eh I'm a pretty weird one. I like either the super black humor, as in making fun of really tragic events, or fully demential, as in events being so random that you can't expect a reasoning mind could came up with it.

So you're like fifteen then?

Nah, I'm probably older than most on this thread. I'm just used to authors not really catering to my comedy taste, as it's either considered gross or childish.

It's considered childish because it IS childish.

You're not, doesn't help that they sprinkle it randomly ruining any tension some scenes may have. Mind you, not like American humour is much better, but at least you don't see an out of place 3 second "comedy" moment in the middle of a battle. Don't remember Saving Private Ryan's Omaha beach scene having a "super funny" comedy moment in the middle of it.

>Variety shows

Was in Italy in summer and they have a tonne of that shit, so some western countries do it too.

My experience has been that all anime fans (very explicitly including Sup Forums) have terrible senses of humor.

I don't like flcl type humour either really. Though I consider many other shows funny so who knows.

Zetsubou sensei, urusei yatsura, and devil is a part timer actually made me laugh at least once

Azumanga daioh, heavy object, and ichigo mashimaro have made me chuckle at least once

I didn't like lucky star, nichijou, gintama, or pani poni dash

It's ok to like none of them, but I liked the shows you watched even if they didn't make me laugh.

Also, don't reply to the bait

>character says something
>another character is upset about it
>"EEEEHHHHH??" and he turns into super-simple cartoony shapes
>everyone laughs while he makes noises and flails

>implying I can laugh at traditional comedy and jokes

Too spoiled by ironic, controversial memes. Aggression and rebellion are a massive component of comedy, which they have loads of. Normalfags generally end up following imageboards a few years down the line too precisely because of those two concepts, see how memes have now gone mainstream.

In 5 years normalfag humour will be similar to the one we have now, except watered down, and we'll have moved on to newer and better stuff. Then the cycle repeats.

>anything
>better than it used to be

Well user when it comes to jokes, things being repeated for 3 years over and over makes them lose their punch. I'd hardly call this "kys senpai desu cuck cuck cuck" shit better than the old days but we aren't gonna burst out laughing when someone posts "SHOOP DA WHOOP DESU!" are we?

>SHOOP DA WHOOP DESU!

>we aren't gonna burst out laughing when someone posts "SHOOP DA WHOOP DESU!" are we?
>tfw we can't go back

It was bad enough before but the discovery of nigger twitter was a catastrophe.