1900 BC: The first joke is told in Sumeria
446 BC: The first comedic playwright, Aristophanes, is born.
1475 AD: Geoffrey Chaucer begins his epic quest for universal comedy with The Canterbury Tales but ultimately never finishes.
1605 AD: Miguel de Cervantes releases the novel Don Quixote de la Mancha, a piece of literature still hailed to this day as one of the funniest things ever written.
1895 AD: L'Arroseur arrosé, the first comedy film, is released.
1926 AD: Buster Keaton releases the film The General, and slapstick comedy is created.
1974 AD: Blazing Saddles, what I consider the funniest film ever made, is released.
2004 AD: Cromartie High School, what I consider the funniest TV series ever made, is released.
STORY: 8/10
No anime has made me laugh harder than Cromartie High School. The misadventures of Kamiyama and his gang of juvenile delinquents are ones that I could experience over and over again and just laugh harder. Is the story some avant garde masterpiece? No, in fact it is non-existent. Cromartie High School is episodic in nature. It has no real plot, no resolution, and little to no character arcs. The series works as showcasing six months of a Sophomore year in what is both the best and worst school in fiction. At Cromartie, there's no teachers or faculty, just delinquents left to their own devices. This allows the series to go into truly bizarre territory, and it does so on an episodic basis.
It is not a perfect set-up, however. While it's fun not knowing what to expect every episode, that feeling of aimless wanderlust starts to diminish as the series come to a close and is replaced with a feeling of pointlessness. If you're watching this for a story, the final episode may be the worst you've ever seen. But if you buy into the hilarity of the premise, you'll know what to expect. You may not know what exactly, you just know it will be funny.
ART: 9/10
The art in Cromartie is, well, terrible, and there's very little of it. This is used however to the anime's benefit and results in some of the funniest sight gags the viewer will ever witness. Every character has the same exact face with just a few alterations, adding to the satire of the educational system being a factory pumping out identical products. Don't expect some flashy stuff to happen; the anime is mostly just people standing around. However, even this is made interesting and hilarious due to the gags and quirks found in the animation style.
SOUND: 9/10
When one of your characters is Freddy Mercury, you know your soundtrack should be good. And as the cover suggests, much of the music in Cromartie High is a love letter to rock n' roll like Queen. The opening is fantastic and memorable, being oddly melancholic despite the sheer hilarity of the opening sequence, resulting in a laugh being heard upon each viewing. The ending theme is equally as bizarre and random as the series itself. The voice acting for the Japanese version is inferior, anyone who says otherwise is wrong. If you are to watch this anime, which I highly advise you do, go with the English Dub. It is without a doubt one of the most hilarious dubs ever made, and an objective improvement over the original Japanese.
CHARACTER: 10/10
Without a doubt the anime's strongest field are its rich and diverse characters. Takashi Kamiyama is the main protagonist. He was an exceptionally good natured student until he went to the longest domino chain in Japan and glued the last piece to the floor. Because of that, he is banished to Cromartie High School for Delinquents. It's assumed he's the toughest guy in school because he is such a wimpy figure in such a tough environment. Kamiyama goes through some truly hilarious revelations as the series progresses, and his letters to his mom (read during the preview to the next episode) are comedy gold.
Next up is Kamiyama's right hand man, Shinjiro Hayashida. Hayashida is the dumbest man alive and sports a pink mowhawk with a mind of its own. I would say he's comedy foil, but everyone is. Every single character in this anime is bafflingly stupid in some way. Because of that, I like to call it "Japan's Beavis and Butthead". If the anime was just Kamiyama and Hayashida, they'd be a perfect comparison to Beavis and Butthead. Thankfully, the cast is shockingly massive for such a short series, and every single character steals the show in concept and comedy.
Just to rattle some students at Cromartie off, there's a gorilla, Freddie Mercury, a robot named Mechazawa, the only semi-competent physical foil named Maeda (Who is kidnapped on a frequent basis and is apathetic to it), a massive beast of a man named Takenouchi who is cripplingly chronologically motion sick, a rich elitist named Hokuto (Who goes to a different school and accidentally shows up at Cromartie and stays there for some reason, hence his different uniform), Hokuto's lackey (A nameless character who follows Hokuto around and tries to let people know his name but is always interrupted), a terrorist pretending to be Takenouchi named Masked Takenouchi, a gang leader named Noboru Yamaguchi who is a connoisseur of sophisticated humor and constantly criticizes the show's humor, and many more. Somehow, they all get ample screen time and each one is perfectly hilarious. The cast in Cromartie is one of the best I've ever seen. Unique, memorable, hilarious, and somehow compelling, they're the friends I wish I had. And they're all somehow 16. Yes that includes Freddie.
ENJOYMENT: 9/10
If it wasn't clear yet, I cherish Cromartie High School. It is one of my most quoted and rewatched anime. I often like to watch it with friends as we laugh heartily at the hilarity of the show and the bizarre resemblance to our own lives. Juvenile delinquent genre is a genre I never knew I loved until I watched Cromartie, which helped me fuel my love for my 2nd favorite part of Jojo, Diamond in Unbreakable (Very, very similar series). I wish I could give this a 10 in Enjoyment, but alas the series does lose some steam in the final few episodes, especially one serious episode that just is not interesting (The only joke is that there was suddenly a serious episode of Cromartie). Even then though, this series always shocks and surprises me, and it ended in a way I never could have seen coming but at the same time should have expected. The series deserved to go on longer than twenty six 11 minute long episodes.
OVERALL: 9/10
Cromartie High School begins bizarre and only get increasingly so. I will admit it is an acquired taste. It is very likely you will only be increasingly annoyed at the sheer stupidity and brain cell killing cast and atmosphere, but then again that's how school feels. Cromartie is a near perfect satire of Japanese school lifestyle with clear cut references that even strike American school lifestyle. It is a series that only seems to get better upon each rewatch. Like the slogan of another juvenile delinquent anime AKIRA, Cromartie High School is good for health but bad for education. You will learn absolutely nothing watching Cromartie High School, but they say laughter is the best medicine. If that's the case, Cromartie High School will keep you alive forever.
