With that said, the ecchi portions of the show are absurdly flashy and basically so in-your-face jokes that there is no ecchi at all. Punch Line is not an arousing show. It was not created with the purpose of being arousing. It was a slice-of-life mystery from episode one. It's a riotous comedy that inverts all sorts of terribleness from the known-to-all loved-by-none (or degenerate) genre of ecchi. It has everything; a zany premise, harem situation, super powers, nose bleeds, the promise of sex jokes, robots, time travel, ninjas, mascot characters, archetypal cast, forgettable lead, low-budget setting, and the list goes on. We are given the direct dose of horrible ecchi setting, but Punch Line just wants to shake you up a little bit. What if the ecchi setting was used for something other than... vapid and lustful entertainment?
We are dealt a handful of hilariously offbeat slice-of-life episodes and then as audience, MAPPA knocks in the head a few times. Were you paying attention? If you haven't seen Punch Line yet, look out - There's no men in the main cast.
The music arrangement in Punch Line is standard issue for the most part. It's electronic and it's ambient and retains some of the doujin and sugar coated feel that the opening brings. The opening theme is really an anthem though, a real stupid, a real catchy, and really bizarre anthem. An ecchi show is all about the assets. It does everything to get your attention. Yet where ecchi shows usually begin to shy away from sexualizing after a certain point, resigning that the audience either gets it or won't watch, they throw together a sloppily and hastily made opening and ending theme. Punch Line does the opposite. Since the show itself is barely about seeing panties or having perverted moments linger, the opening does that in a 90 seconds full salvo. The ending is the opposite, an innocent and childlike fantasy. This ending theme is often at odds with the shows rather dark themes of imminent destruction and isolation.
And that's actually what Punch Line is about. It's about a group of people with actually very little in common, living in the suburbs of Japan, in small rooms all right next door to each other. What do a bullied hikkikimori, annoying land-owner, a drunk floozy, and an ordinary school girl all have in common? Is it possible to live in such proximity to people and have no connection with them? The story of Punch Line is absurd and starts and ends promising, quite literally, the destruction of the world. And we get the destruction of the world. A couple times actually. But what Punch Line is a good flex of narrative muscle, bringing together originally stereotypical characters into a community that gives them just a little more innovation than the rest of the industry can do right now. Ecchi is a whole genre built on absurdism - how far can the label be pushed until the audience doesn't want to watch anymore and how far can the program go before the government axes production clean off the air for indecency. It is a totally unconventional place to actually enjoy a cast of characters, but Punch Line does it. Punch Line ends up being a believable story of unlikely friendships.
This completely absurd show with no boundaries and just an handful of troupes that the scriptwriter wanted to toy with actually manages to make you care. That is Punch Lines charm.
When you get down and dirty with Punch Line you end up with a more riveting and somehow believable conclusion than the finale of Steins;Gate. The finesse it takes to bring such a lurid and stupid premise and breathe life into a genre devoid of any human dignity makes for a grand display, one you can't believe. I have to seriously congratulate Punch Line for managing to show that Kill la Kill wasn't just a one and done thing. It takes a lot of lace to tie together a show this buoyant.
