One of the more specialized areas of any culture is its comedy, and learning to appreciate Japanese humor in its various forms frankly took me a few years. One of the core elements of Japanese comedy is 漫才 manzai, a formal stand-up routine that involves two men, the boke (bo-keh, meaning “dull-witted”) who sets up jokes in a purposefully clumsy way, while the tsukkomi (“thrusting in with a witty comment”) reacts with verbal sharpness. This straight man/wise guy dynamic is not unique to Japan, and such famous pairings as Laurel and Hardy, Penn and Teller, the Blues Brothers and even R2-D2 and C-3P0 follow this hallowed tradition. The boke/tsukkomi dynamic shows up in anime a lot, and one of the best examples I can think of is Seitokai Yakuindomo (aka SYD), the hilarious series about a girl’s high school which recently became co-ed, so that there are only a few males surrounded by hundreds of (generally perverted) females. In the show, poor Takatoshi and Suzu are the tsukkomi characters, reacting to the sexual jokes which are constantly being made by all the other characters, mostly Shiho and Aria. Who are your favorite boke and tsukkomi characters in anime?
(The word boke is the same word that describes the blur effect of a high-end lens, and recently in cell phone cameras. I’ve given up trying to get people to pronounce it correctly, e.g. boh-keh, since I know no one will do it.)
The humor of Seitokai Yakuindomo is classic.
