Teppen!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Girls, Bravo.

I want to start off by saying that I really, really want to like Teppen. Studio Drive has created a colourful, well animated show with expressive and likeable characters and the voice actors do a killer job keeping the flow of the conversation up throughout all the episodes I’ve watched. It’s an impressive production with very little empty or awkward space to throw off the pacing, just like an actual group comedy skit performance.

However, you’d think an anime about cute girls training to becoming professional comedians would be a bit… funnier?
I know that good comedy is different depending on what you find ... humorous, but for me the comedy in Teppen is lukewarm at best. It’s not like the show doesn’t have the building blocks to make a hilarious show. The cast is made up of quirky girls from all different walks of life and one girl is heavily implied to be an alien which she constantly tries to protest. That’s legitimately funny. I did enjoy episode 1 and the introduction to all the different groups as well as the ridiculous house warden and I enjoyed episode 4(3) which was about one of the girls gambling on crypto, but I can’t say that I busted a gut laughing from these episodes which are on par with your average moé school life, comedy anime and it seems from this shows current MAL rating (6.27) I’m not the only one who feels this way.
I do think that maybe the shows rhythm was thrown off due to the cancellation of episode 2 thanks to some real world events, but also maybe not.

I don’t want to bash the show too hard. Like I said at the beginning, I really want to like it and I think if you’re interested then you should absolutely give Teppen a go. Humour is in the eye of the humoured, but I just watched episode 5(4) and I seriously questioned why I was still watching which for me, is a death flag for a comedy show.

Also the OP is a banger.

5/10 Mediocre.

Here I am, questioning to myself again: yet another manzai comedy? And after the blandness that is Maesetsu! that only really speaks to the native Japanese (which everyone else will not understand), is Teppen!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (And yes, that is 15 exclamation marks, the most after Keijo with 8) gonna be any different? In a hopeful way, I wish I do, because of all the manzai comedy that has been seen, Teppen is easily the best out of the lot that I remember, though not without its issues.

We all understand comedy in all sorts of various ways. But when if it's one that's ingrained only to a ... certain demographic, that honestly is a bit hard to justify its existence to everyone else. And this is exactly what Teppen!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! has going for it, being a Japanese manzai a.k.a stand-up comedy that's all the rage in Japan as a traditional pastime. Unfortunately, if you don't understand much about that, I can tell you that it's hard to really love this show for all that's worth of its various references and such.

The basis for Teppen!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! is exactly what it sounds like: a group of girls incorporated into a competition (the Teppen Grand Prix) from the views of 3 new and aspiring young rookies (Yayoi Sakamoto, Yomogi Takahashi and Yuzu Hosono) whom want to make it big with comedy, and finding themselves living together with other groups with their own quirks and features, all in the vying to win the competition with the best they could. And I'll say that I give marks for some originality that's done here to showcase the various groups according to their regions (Young Wai-wai from Kansai (region), Celebri-Tea from Tokai, Akudare Kingdom from Kanto, Invaders from Hokkaido, and Bullet Kunoichi from Kansai (area)) and fully establishing the real-life counterpart identities from where they come from, for all 15 girls.

As for the part of the show that supposedly wants to make the audience "Laughing 'til You Cry"...well that is pretty much a mixed bag. You either love it or find it boring (as is my case) that some references will be generally understood, but for a comedy skit performance, it isn't as refined as say the CGDCT moments for the group that lives in Takako-so under the watch of "Onegai Muscle" rip-off Manager-cum-caretaker Seiji Tani. Throughout the course of the anime showing the groups' various skits (at least on my watch), most of them were quite boring but not stale, as per the motive to infuse comedy where it works best. To this I say, maybe you can understand the inference better than I do, and there're two sides to the comedy coin in this case.

The most impressive I've seen from this show is the mixed usage of Seiyuus that for a large character cast such as this, they did their job well to retain the feeling of infused, fine comedy. And this is brought forward to the OP, which is the most creative that I've both seen and heard of others calling it a banger, and it's not without reason that its over-the-top goofiness allows to embrace its intentions wholeheartedly. And largely for that, it succeeded. May'n's ED isn't half bad either, now that I think of it, especially when the OST is that subpar and generic, there were a few standouts, though it honestly didn't make my experience watching this any better, even with studio Drive's whack-outta-the-wazoo like visuals, which also got the job done as it should.

It's absurd, it's wacky, it's just comedy. And believe me, I've tried to like Teppen!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and what it has going for it, but it's just boring and ludicrious to sit for 12 episodes expecting to understand references and body jokes, to the point of messing with my brain and thinking: "Comedy can be better than this, and it doesn't have to be limited after all."

Teppen!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!'s definitely not a snoozefest, but a sleepfest of a dream with sheep baaing question marks on top of my head, now that's more affirmative.