Show-ha Shouten! A Solid Comedy Manga (that Isn't Funny)
How a story centered around comedians is still good without being... that comedic
I love reading manga. One of my favorite things to do is to pick up a brand new series that I know nothing about and dive into it blind, arriving at my own opinions. Some of the series I’ve done that with include Haikyuu!!, Grand Blue, Tomo-chan Is a Girl! — and now, Show-ha Shoten!
Show-ha Shoten! has a lot going for it in my books.
A series about comedians. I adore stand-up comedy.
Not only that, but a series by the illustrator of Death Note, Bakuman, and Hikaru no Go?
And it’s got duo shounen main characters trying to make it to the top together?
I’m so in.
So this is kind of my Show-ha Shoten! review. The premise of the story is that two high school boys decide to team up together for different reasons but with the same goal in mind—to become great comedians. The series revolves around a Japanese form of comedy called “manzai” (漫才), where there’s a funny man (“boke”, 惚け) and a straight man (“tsukkomi”, 突っ込み). The funny man says ridiculous things, and the straight man provides comedic reactions to everything, contextualizing the jokes for the audience and almost playing the role of on-stage audience member.
Here’s a great video that breaks down Japanese comedy, and manzai specifically:
But I will say, going into the first chapters of the series, I felt a bit apprehensive. How would stand-up comedy translate (literally) in manga form? And would this very specific Japanese form of stand-up comedy be funny to me?
I quickly found that I was asking the wrong questions. Because in manga, the thing that carries the story isn’t the setting, or the gimmick. It’s the STORY! And boy, does Show-ha Shoten!’s story have a lot of heart. Is it hilarious? No, and sometimes yes—but the funniest moments are often just the characters interacting, not the comedy acts (and there are a lot of those).
But how could it be okay for the comedy routines to… not be funny? Well, it’s because the purpose of the comedy routines in the story to showcase the genius and growth of the characters as comedians—to exhibit how they work the crowd, what they’re thinking as they tell their perfectly rehearsed jokes, and the emotional wins when a crowd and competition judges accept or reject them. And that’s the secret—Show-ha Shoten! isn’t a comedy or gag manga. It’s a straight-up shounen battle manga.
The Show-ha Shoten! characters and their charming (and often brutal) backstories are what carry this story, and my, do they carry it well.
The first chapter suffers from exposition overload, for sure. But as the author creates more room to breathe by building repeated successes with the reader, different characters’ backstories have space to unfold more naturally. I’m especially a fan of the way Taiyo Higashikata’s history is woven throughout multiple key character’s stories. Female comedy duo Broken Glass Slipper’s backstory is another favorite of mine, and it’s completely standalone, disconnected from any of the main characters.
That’s a true mark of incredible story telling for me—when the author can make me care deeply about side characters without leaning on pre-established narratives to do so. Haikyuu!! author Haruichi Furudate is a master at this, as is Yoshihiro Togashi, famed author of Hunter x Hunter.
It’s the same formula that made Bakuman, Takeshi Obata’s other series about manga authors, successful. In Bakuman, the stories that the mangaka (authors) would come up with weren’t the most compelling, jaw-dropping stories ever—many of them were fairly ordinary on the surface. But that’s because the point of the manga wasn’t to come up with 500 other incredible manga ideas and shove them in the reader’s face. It was to tell a story, gosh dang it.
And that’s exactly what Show-ha Shoten! does in its (so far) 23 chapters. The comedy routines aren’t jaw dropping. But I’ll be damned if the story telling isn’t tight. And that’s what matters.
Give it a try if you want a well written story that you can still get in on at the start. You can even borrow my Shonen Jump app subscription, lol.
- Blake