Seitokai Yakuindomo, Comedy or Tragedy?

A stark contrast from the summer of 2009, which featured many entertaining shows and at least one absolutely amazing show, this summer was quite disappointing as far as animated content goes. Unexpectedly, Seitokai Yakuindomo was a show that had me hooked from the beginning, though as I was following Doki’s fansubs it wasn’t until a few days ago that I was finally able to get past the third episode. The humor in this show is lame. So lame, but so good. While this post is sort of a review, it’s more on why I think the humor in SYD works, so I won’t be focusing much on plot details or characters. So more on this after the break.

Finding a shot with all 4 main characters, not with abysmal in-between animation is quite difficult.

Based on a weekly 4koma, SYD follows the perennial structure of continuous gags that has been refined to a science. It never fails to amaze me how similar each of these shows is to the last one I’ve seen. A group of four high-school students, mostly girls, thinking about random things, with the following traits distributed among them: loli-ness, air-headedness, exceptional intelligence, flat-chest, large boobs, and designated tsukkomi. Missing a few, but you get the idea. Maybe four is just a convenient number of characters to design and is the bare minimum to encapsulate all of these traits, and there are shows that have a different number of girls, but there just seems to be something magic about that number.

All the tricks are exposed in the first episode. Every single scene is a boke-tsukkomi sequence that ends in a one-liner involving sex, Aria’s wealth, or Suzu’s height. Literally. The lack of variety in the jokes is so apparent that most of them you can see coming minutes before the punch-line is actually delivered. They are so bad that you are groaning through the entire progression of the joke. Yet when the “shock” finally comes, you can’t help but smile, or dare I say, laugh. It should be noted here that in general, I don’t find these jokes funny, which is what makes SYD so interesting.

You can’t honestly be surprised with an introduction like this. Or can you?

Many of the scenes expose the punchline immediately as the title of the scene. It means that there is almost none of that element of surprise so necessary in shows of this type. As soon as you see Tsuda use that tissue, you know exactly what’s going to happen in the next scene. This type of foreshadowing is commonly seen in drama, in the form of irony. Like in the most tragic incidents of a play, the viewer often knows well beforehand the terrible fate that awaits the protagonists. And I feel this is exactly the kind of feeling that SYD plays on. There is certainly a tension that builds up to the climax of each scene, as you hope that the line of conversation doesn’t reach the horrible conclusion that you know it will reach.

Something is being done right when the number 19 becomes a humorous concept.

In this way, SYD is a lot like a tragedy. It’s power is not based in its wittiness, though it has some, but rather in the breaking of the tension caused by the dramatic irony formed in the progression of each conversation. One ironically similar example is Shakespeare, who would often introduce a fool to make crude jokes in the middle of an otherwise extremely serious play. On one hand, such scenes keep the more vulgar part of the audience entertained, when they may otherwise not care at all about the fate of Macbeth. Yet breaking the tension, I feel, is quite important in the delivery of the play, to remind the audience that in some ways the situation isn’t as grave as it has felt up until then (it is, “merely” a play, after all), and that perhaps the series of events is not unlike this poor fool struggling to make bad jokes to entertain the audience.

And I think this is why the humor in SYD is quite funny. The timing of the lines is impeccable, considering the points when the tension needs to be broken. The characters are cute, smart, yet delightfully flawed idiots. They act simultaneously as the heroes, villains, and fools of a miniature play found in each dialogue. I often find some degree of humor in dramatically ironic events, and it is a type of  humor that I enjoy immensely. That SYD can play with this kind of irony for a purely comic effect makes it an interesting and enjoyable show to watch.