Shouha Shouten!
Show-ha Shoten!

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Okay, to keep it short, Shouha Shouten is a refreshing treat amidst all the heavy manga out there. Sometimes all you gotta read is something light, just like this series.

Two of the main characters are interesting and complete each other. The jokes is quite funny and the performance that they set on stage is pretty interesting. The art is awesome as expected from Takeshi Obata. Love the detail of the art and some Bakuman reminiscence in both the characters and the art style. However, to note that it just reach only chapter 4, the story might not reach its potential yet, but i have a ... lot of expectations from this series.

Up until chapter 4, it has been a fun journey! Can't wait for what's more in store

This will likely be the only review I post, but I wanted to give my opinion on this manga since it seems to differ from the rest. Long story short: Show-ha Shouten! rocks, but if you are looking for a straightforward comedy manga you are in the wrong place.

Show-ha Shouten is, at its core, a battle manga. The central plot focuses on the development of the two protagonists, their victories, their losses, and the things they learn. For them, making jokes is not so much a matter of making us as the audience laugh, but learning what techniques will make the audience in the manga ... laugh. Things like timing, delivery, physicality, suspense, and subversion are all explored as though they are a science. But why? Well, for comedians, this is how comedy works.

Show-ha Shouten! resonated with me the way Haikyuu may resonate with those who played volleyball in High School. Many of my high school days were spent watching old SNL re-runs, analyzing the efficacy of Monty Python sketches, and longing to perform comedy in front of a live audience. I would memorize the way comedians shifted their cadence, noting how even the slightest inflection could impact the way a joke landed with an audience; I developed a greater sense of physicality through comic theatre performance, learning what it meant to play with the audience; I would go to stand-up comedy performance and watch the audience more than the comedian to see how they leaned into each joke and waited for release. To me, comedy was a passion, a science, and an art form all in one. Many people I talked to were shocked when I explained that the process of learning how to be funny was a distinctly unfunny one and that I spent more time studying than I did laughing at any jokes.

All of this is to say, Show-ha Shouten! is about the drive it takes to make people laugh. This series is about passion, failure, rehearsal, and lots of studying. It is about the rush that enters a comic’s heart when an audience laughs and the anxiety of entirely bombing a set. It is for every person that watched comedians, learned from them, and genuinely wanted to be just like them.

I believe everyone should give Show-ha Shouten! a chance. You may not be walking away in tears every chapter because of some fantastic one-liner or incredible visual gag, but you will walk away with a greater sense of the passion and hard-work that goes into comedy. Through the competitions you will begin to understand the vulnerability this form of performance necessitates and the dedication of those who choose to compete in this field professionally. You will also meet some fantastic characters along the way. I think this manga has some incredible partnerships and I think that is a given when considering how intimate comedy can be. There are also some pretty kick-ass women in the manga and a discussion of misogyny within the comedy realm (though how appropriately this is handled is subject to debate).

Show-ha Shouten! may not be a traditional battle manga, but it is an interesting one and an exciting addition to an increasingly diverse genre.

Making somebody laugh every once in a while is not, by itself, a huge achievement. Whenever I'm casually talking to somebody, even if it's a person I've just met, I'm often cracking jokes or making witty remarks—and much of the time they land. Let's say one in three or four does. That's decent for an average person in a social situation but not remotely enough for a successful stand-up act. The goal there is making unfamiliar people who aren't predisposed to liking you consistently laugh at a majority of your jokes. This requires a talent for storytelling, some degree of acting ability and enunciation, and ... a commanding presence that sweeps the audience in the comedian's flow. I have a lot of respect for good stand-up. It's hard, and most people will never be able to acquire all the necessary skills to make it their career even if they try.

This translates to manga as well. Just pasting the text of a joke into a speech bubble, even if it's well-written, won't cut it. The joke needs to be connected to the character(s) telling it, placed into the right context, with artwork that complements it well, and ideally it should feed directly into a different joke or a visual gag to create a comedic continuity. The best comedy manga out there do this so well they can string together multiple pay-offs from a single setup, to the point where jokes pretty much write themselves in the reader's mind with the writer only needing to give it a small nudge: Grand Blue, Gintama, Kaguya-sama, Witch Watch, The Lives of High-School Boys, Detroit Metal City, Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun, Dungeon Meshi, Hinamatsuri, Nan Hao and Shang Feng, Cromartie High School...

...Hmm, what is it? Huh? You're saying this was supposed to be a Show-ha Shoten review? Oh... Well, unlike those works listed above, Show-ha Shoten kinda sucks at comedy. Badum-tss!

To illustrate what makes it suck, re-read the previous three paragraphs as if they were an in-universe joke performed and narrated by characters in this manga—because that's exactly what its jokes look like. It would spend some time diligently explaining how to perform comedy and how to find the right psychological approach to the audience to make them laugh—and then it would proceed with some of the most tired, flaccid, predictable punchlines imaginable. As if the actual joke is in how flat the writing is. Watching the characters cracking up at something so profoundly unfunny feels surreal, borderline mentally uncomfortable. At some point you start wondering whether the characters are okay, and then whether *you* are okay for not buying into the humor to such an extent. Not exactly something I want to think about reading a comedy manga.

The reason why it hurts storytelling so particularly badly in this case is that convincing the reader the joke was great if they didn't laugh at it is impossible. If it were a more physical subject, like sports or some kind of a military setting, the artwork could've carried the narrative to an extent, presenting something as an extraordinary feat, and the reader would suspend their disbelief to accept it as true because that's how it was made to appear from their point of view. But when the reader deals with something that can be directly gauged with their own cognitive ability or applied to their own perception and experience, convincing them of feats that aren't there just isn't going to happen. And given that Show-ha Shoten's story is a bog-standard competitive shonen formula based around the characters moving up in the world of comedy, it will be something that will always remain in the spotlight with all of its strength and weaknesses.

Speaking of the strengths, it may occasionally be clever to an extent (or at least be presented as such), but the one time it made me laugh in the entire first volume of the story was when it didn't actually try to be funny on purpose. All the other times I had to be *told* that the characters were doing great rather than it being, you know, self-evident from me having a good time following them. If I'm laughing at something, I can already tell; thank you very much. Acting out of character, saying non-sequitur lines, or being silly for the sake of being silly does not, by itself, make for a good comedy. But, to be fair, the bit at the High School Comedy Battle did make me smile because the physical comedy there was at least *conceptualized* well, something to thank the artist for. With all the varied facial expressions and such, I could imagine it being a hoot if it were a real performance (or at least a well-made anime rendition). But I still needed to mentally fill in the gaps left open by writing. And that's all the praise I can give to about 200 pages worth of content released so far.

Kind of a shame for a comedy series, isn't it. It could've been so much better if the jokes were well-written. Well... at least Takeshi Obata's art is still good. That's what you came here for anyway, isn't it?