I find that American TV these days are all flooded with reality shows and it’s going overboard. TV producers are just milking that genre till its bare dry. I don’t even know what season it is anymore for shows like American Idol, Survivor, Big Brother, and the Bachelor/Bachelorette and I don’t care about the Kardashians and especially Jersey Shore. I’m just not into this trend. I enjoy watching shows with crime investigations and forensics/food/travel/old movies but that can get repetitive too. My days have been filled with Japanese variety shows – I guess that is what you can call them. Particularly I am following a manzai (stand-up comedy) group called Downtown whose members are Hitoshi Matsumoto and Masatoshi Hamada. Manzai involves two performers —a straight man (tsukkomi) and a funny man (boke)—trading jokes at great speed. Most of the jokes revolve around mutual misunderstandings, double-talk, puns and other verbal gags. In this case Hamada is the tsukkomi and Matsumoto is the boke. One of their shows they host is called ダウンタウンのガキの使いやあらへんで!! (Downtown’s ‘This is no task for kids!!’), where they hold a lot of batsu game/punishment games, cooking series where they come up with wacky creations, and comedy shorts with regular members Shouzou Endo, Naoki Tanaka, and Housei Yamazaki.
Majority of the ones I watch is they’re “No laughing” punishment games where if you laugh, you’ll get a smack in the ass by a giant foam pencil (in the past they used bamboo swords, darts, and a whip or a few times give thai kick or a hit in the balls) for each laugh they catch you with. Each year they pick a theme and they get “trained” for that particular occupation and the producer will do everything he can to catch them off guard with celebrity appearances and tasks they have to do. Those guys even attack each other to get them to laugh. I almost felt like dying from laughing way too much many times. Even though my Japanese isn’t that good, I still enjoy the physical comedy that comes out of it. I had a friend tell me that I must be sadistic enough to enjoy laughing at their misfortune, which I don’t think that’s true. I like it because it’s funny and I haven’t laughed this much for a long time even with the current shows they have on TV. I do however don’t agree with how they give out some of their punishments since they can be too cruel sometimes.
Here is a sampling of their shows:
1st 30 minutes of No Laughing Hospital
http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/category/comedy/watch/v178307003Ax7BzQ6
http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/category/comedy/watch/v17867061FrDHY7ky
http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/category/comedy/watch/v17908592PAmDMM3K
Favorite clip:
http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/category/comedy/watch/v17939642TEz8JPn4
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