There's a man who fights with his nose hair. There's a man who has devoted his life to the recorder. There's a high schooler who, in the middle of a fight, unzips his fly. And there's a girl with deer antlers on her head, stuck on a power line.
Question: can you explain what's funny about any of these?
Let me confess something up front. Japanese people can't really explain them either. We know what's happening. We understand the words. We still have no idea why any of it is happening. And we laugh anyway.
In Japanese, this kind of humor is called shūru. It comes from shūrurearisumu, surrealism, the art movement, but in everyday speech it simply means the comedy of absurd situations, strange combinations and twists you never saw coming.
But here's what I want to say before we start: shūru is not "anything goes". Read these four series again alongside what their creators have said and what fans have argued about for years, and you find that every one of them is carefully designed: where you laugh, and how. It looks like nonsense. It runs on a plan.
Ready?
Masaru-san (1995): comedy that makes you flinch first
No talk of Japanese shūru gag manga is complete without this one. Sexy Commando Gaiden: Sugoi yo!! Masaru-san was Kyosuke Usuta's debut series in Weekly Shōnen Jump, and Japanese fans still say it changed gag manga.
The hero, Masaru Hananakajima, practices a fictional martial art called Sexy Commando. The idea is simple: do something so strange that your opponent freezes, then attack while they're frozen.
His eyes flash, he lets out a long "Haaaaa…", and he unzips his fly. Out comes a pigeon. Or a flower. Or a can of ark shells. His opponent stands there thinking what is this man doing?, and that's the opening. In other words, the reason the reader is baffled and the reason the enemy is defenceless are exactly the same.
Usuta's comedy has a recognizable pattern.
First, the absurd thing happens. Then nobody reacts. There's a strange, empty pause. Only after that does the reaction come. Because the joke isn't finished in a single panel, the comedy moves at a slow, deliberate tempo. And the reaction usually doesn't correct anything ("Don't do that!"). It just describes what has happened ("He went and did it!").
One Japanese fan on 2ch, the giant anonymous message board, put it this way: it's not comedy that hypes the reader up, it's comedy that makes the reader recoil, and gets the laugh from that. You flinch for a second, wait, what?, and the laugh slips into that gap.
This pattern changed what came after it. After Masaru-san, much of Jump's gag manga is said to have shifted toward shūru, and Hikaru Nakamura, the creator of Saint Young Men and Arakawa Under the Bridge, names Usuta as the root of that comedy. If you've enjoyed either of those, this is where that humor came from.
In English, the 1998 anime adaptation, made of ten-minute episodes, has been described as a show of insane gags no sane person could comprehend, and reviewers are sharply split on it. Comedy built on making you recoil will always lose a few people who never come back.
Jaguar (2000): the timing is the joke
Usuta's next series, Pyū to Fuku! Jaguar, ran in Jump for exactly ten years, from 2000 to 2010, with a fixed spot on the very last page of the magazine.
Kiyohiko Sakatome wants to be a musician. At an audition, he meets a mysterious man named Jaguar Junichi, gets nicknamed "Piyohiko" for no reason, and ends up forced into the "recorder department" of a talent school, where Jaguar is the teacher. The instrument Jaguar is so passionate about is the recorder: the simple flute Japanese children learn in elementary-school music class.
Take a scene from volume 8. Piyohiko is trying out new CDs at a music store when he spots Jaguar at the back, wearing headphones. Curious what he's listening to, Piyohiko walks over. Jaguar isn't listening to anything. He has a "flute-phone" in his mouth, a recorder fused with headphones, so he can practice the recorder without anyone hearing.
It makes no sense. But in the few panels it takes Piyohiko to walk over, you already know something is coming.
Japanese fans compare the two series like this: Masaru-san is the one-shot, out-of-nowhere shūru gag, while Jaguar is closer to a carefully built comedy double act. Masaru-san is the one that makes you burst out laughing; Jaguar is the one you reread.
Usuta himself gives a clue about where that craftsmanship comes from. Talking about FROGMAN, the director who animated Jaguar, he praised his "perfect timing, like a drum's offbeat that hits the gap in the tempo", and said it was close to what he himself finds funny.
He thinks about comedy as rhythm. A story about a would-be guitarist and a man obsessed with the recorder, drawn by an artist who thinks of jokes as drumbeats. That doesn't feel like a coincidence.
Critics also point to Usuta's naming: names that grab you by sound alone, alongside lazy nicknames like "Piyohiko" and "Hammer". Fantastic leaps, then sudden total sloppiness. The contrast is part of the rhythm.
One practical note: Jaguar never had a TV series. Its anime exists only as short Flash-animation DVDs and a 2009 film.
Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo (2001): turning gag rules into battle tactics
Do you remember a man fighting with his nose hair on Cartoon Network in the mid-2000s? An English dub of this series aired there from 2005. In that dub, Tokoro Tennosuke, a character whose body is made of tokoroten (a Japanese jelly-like food), became Jelly Jiggler.
First, say the title out loud: Bo-bo-bo-bo Bo-bo-bo. That's the hero's name.
The world is ruled by the Hair Hunters, who take everyone's hair (the anime calls their empire the Margarita Empire; in the original manga it's the Maruhage Empire, which means, more or less, the "Totally Bald Empire"). Bobobo rises up for the freedom of hair, using Fist of the Nose Hair, a martial art of controlling his nose hair at will.
Tyranny, the Four Generals, a final showdown with the emperor: the skeleton is a completely standard shōnen battle manga. At its center is nose hair. In the middle of fights, little comedy sketches break out, his friends goof off, and the next twist arrives before you've made sense of the last one. The series has its own word for going all-out ridiculous: hajike.
What's interesting is that the hajike isn't just a distraction from the fights. Japanese fans have analyzed how the gags themselves work as battle tactics.
For example, Bobobo sometimes blocks an enemy's attack by using his friends Don Patch or Jelly Jiggler as a shield. In gag manga, a character caught up in slapstick is always fine by the next panel. Bobobo exploits that rule: an attack that should be devastating becomes a "funny accident", and nobody gets hurt. The enemy, who is fighting seriously, doesn't get that protection.
He takes the rules of gag manga and turns them into weapons in a battle manga. That's why, if you watch it like a normal battle series and try to understand each new technique, the floor you were building gets carried away from under you.
Your only lifeline is Beauty, the girl who serves as the series' tsukkomi, the one who reacts to the nonsense. Every time she calls something out, you get to confirm that yes, that really was ridiculous. But her calling it out doesn't make the world sane again. (More on how the tsukkomi works: why yelling is funny in anime comedy.)
On an old English-language anime forum, one fan summed it up: the show is meant to be the kind of crazy that doesn't really make sense. The kids who laughed at it without understanding it were watching it exactly right.
My Deer Friend Nokotan (2024): the tsukkomi is engineered
Did a song chanting "shikanoko nokonoko koshitantan" find its way to you in the summer of 2024? That's "Shikairo Days", the opening of this series. The Japanese title is Shikanoko Nokonoko Koshitantan.
Before the anime aired, the promotion team released an hour-long video of nothing but the first few seconds of the opening, looped. Someone on the team said it was an idea they came up with in about three seconds. It spread before the first episode even aired, and by the final episode, the official opening video had passed 25 million views.
The story begins when Torako Koshi, a model student hiding her past as a delinquent, rescues a girl on her way to school: Noko Shikanoko, "Nokotan", whose antlers are caught on a power line.
According to the creator, Oshioshio, the starting point was the thought that a girl with antlers getting stuck in doorways, or being unable to take off a T-shirt, would be funny. The seed of the absurdity is simply the everyday inconvenience of having antlers.
And this is where the design comes in. In the original pitch, Torako was a delinquent who didn't hide it. But that didn't work: she couldn't keep giving Nokotan sensible, corrective reactions, and a delinquent would be more likely to hit and kick. So they changed her into a former delinquent hiding her past. Nokotan knows her secret, so Torako has no choice but to stay by her side. The creator and her editor explained this in an interview.
The anime's director, Masahiko Ohta, added more layers:
- Realistic CG deer placed among the cute anime girls, to create an instant visual jolt
- A "**two-stage tsukkomi system**": Torako reacts, and then a male narrator reacts again from above
- Nokotan can do almost anything, but not too much, because if she goes too far, Torako's reactions can't keep up
To show the absurd, you first have to work out exactly where the person catching it is standing. That's the secret of how shūru is made, written out in plain words.
To be fair, though: the opening went viral around the world, but the show itself split opinion in Japan. In English, one reviewer wrote that the first episode had "far too many screws loose" to even write about, while admitting it "did make me chuckle here and there".
Shūru has a rhythm
Put the four side by side:
| Series | How the joke works | Who's on your side |
|---|---|---|
| Masaru-san | A strange pause after the absurd moment: you recoil first, then laugh | Fūmin |
| Jaguar | Timing built like a comedy double act, with offbeat contrasts | Piyohiko |
| Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo | The rules of gag manga turned into battle weapons | Beauty |
| My Deer Friend Nokotan | Everything, from the tsukkomi's backstory to the narrator, designed to catch the absurd | Torako, and the narrator |
Every one of them puts someone next to the absurdity who is just as baffled as you are. And every one of them cares about when the laugh lands: Usuta's "drum's offbeat", the sound of Bobobo's name, the loop of Nokotan's opening.
***Shūru* isn't comedy that has thrown away meaning. It's comedy that makes you laugh with rhythm instead of meaning.**
That's why it can reach you even if you don't know every reference. A dead-serious face, the bafflement around it, a pause that goes on a little too long. Some Japanese people never get into it, and some viewers overseas fall for it instantly.
"I don't understand it" and "it isn't funny" are not the same thing.
Go on. Explain them.
Back to the question. Can you explain what's funny about these four?
When I was at university, I once skipped my lectures and spent an entire day with friends talking about why Jaguar was so funny. We didn't stay quiet because we couldn't explain it. We couldn't stop talking because it was so funny. Which exchange was the best, why that one pause got us every time. Talking about a scene would remind us of it, and we'd start laughing all over again.
So this challenge isn't meant to keep anyone out. Watch, laugh, and come back with your own explanation. Or try to explain it and end up laughing again. That works too.
Kore ga Nihon no shūrizumu ya. This is Japan's shūrizumu: shūru, plus rhythm.
Go on. Explain them. I dare you.
There are plenty more great gag manga where these came from. If you want more, let me know through the contact page. If enough of you ask, I'll write another round.
Sources and notes
- Kyosuke Usuta on FROGMAN's timing ("like a drum's offbeat"): eiga.com interview (2008)
- Usuta's comic style (the absurd moment, the strange pause, the descriptive reaction) and its influence on later gag manga: Pixiv Encyclopedia
- Hikaru Nakamura on the roots of their comedy: Japanese Wikipedia)
- The "flute-phone" scene in Jaguar volume 8, and Usuta's naming sense: Comic Natalie column by Iida
- Japanese fan comments on Usuta's work: 2ch thread summary (Gaharog News)
- Masaru-san in English: AniDB, MyAnimeList
- Jaguar basics: Japanese Wikipedia, Comic Natalie on the final chapter
- Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo: English Wikipedia, characters (English Wikipedia), Maruhage Empire (Japanese Wikipedia), Tokoro Tennosuke (Toei Animation), Pixiv Encyclopedia on hajike and fan analysis of gags as tactics, Anime Superhero Forum
- My Deer Friend Nokotan: Comic Natalie interview with Oshioshio and her editor, Comic Natalie interview with director Masahiko Ohta, Animate Times, PASH! PLUS, Filmarks, This Week in Anime
- Embedded video: TWIN ENGINE official YouTube channel
Fan comments are presented as opinions, not facts. Names are written given name first, as they usually appear in English releases.