For me, those two dreaded words have slowly warped in meaning over the years, once instilling excitement and anticipation and then slowly drying up into a well of disappointment and crushed expectations. As I took recommendation after recommendation I figured that surely, eventually, I would find a show that clicked with my sense of humor and leave me crying tears of sweet mirthful bliss. Comedy is all personal, remember, so I'm not bashing any of these shows for those who enjoyed them, but these were my personal reactions. Noazki-kun didn't quite elicit a confession of love from me. Cromartie High was a little off-the-mark. Detroit Metal City got me to nod appreciatively, but never actually laugh. Konosuba just made me wish there were more D&D episodes in Community. My recommendation list stretched thin, I finally turned to the looming behemoth, the all-mighty and universally revered Gintama, and after three separate attempts to watch it I finally collapsed 20 episodes in, bored out of my mind. Craving the sweet release of mindless, hilarious entertainment, I crawled back to my roots and checked to see if The Devil is a Part-Timer was still on Netflix.
It was. Could it stand the test of time? Well, it was worth the risk. The answer?
...Kindof? Let's take a look. But before that, let's talk comedy.
The greatest comedies all have a few things in common. First off, they HAVE to be innovative. Comedies of course dry up when they recycle the same humor over and over (helllooo One Punch Man) but just presenting different types of humor isn't enough. Shows have to be imaginative, constructing new and unheard-of situations that belong solely to them. Gintama is pretty stellar at this once in awhile, but it suffers from a lack of consistency, which is something else great comedies have in common. Dud episodes stand out a lot more in comedies than other shows, as you can kind of ignore weird filler in a plot but when your objective is face-value entertainment, 20 minutes of boredom will snap you right out of a laughing mood. The best comedies though aren't just consistent and creative, they have strong central casts that have uniquely compelling dynamics and garner strong emotional ties from their audience. This is something anime comedies usually do well, as most 'comedies' are actually really just feel-good and often random slice-of-life shows. That feel-good feeling is crucial, as it elevated the impact of the jokes if you also CARE about the characters, and is often enough to get you through the slower parts. Finally, and this is the one that nearly every comedy, anime or not, fails at, there's propulsion. By having a status quo that actually shifts you dramatically increase investment in the character's lives, create a plethora of opportunities for fresh humor, and introduce another level of investment as people will now actually care about the plot. Unfortunately, most shows will excessively spam the 'reset' button at the end of each brief story arc, forcing everything back to exactly how it was, or, in the case of American sitcoms, they'll just have all the main cast take turns dating each other to the point where these romances cease to mean anything. This ploy makes sense: once you have a formula that works, messing with it too much can be dangerous, especially as it can muck up that comfort of reliability so many viewers crave. However, only those comedies with propulsion to their story line truly rise majestically above the rest to become real masterpieces.
So where does The Devil is a Part-Timer stand in all this?
In a bit of an odd place, truth be told.
'Hataraku Maou-sama!' or 'The Devil is a Part-Timer' is a glossy 1-cour saga following a premise that sounds extremely anime. The Demon King, referred to often simply as "Satan", finds himself cornered by the forces of Good and decides to flee the generic fantasy realm of Ente Isla with his trusted remaining general. Whoops though, they end up in Tokyo, looking like regular people and missing nearly all of their magic. A classic blunder. While I guess this is technically a nifty spin on the isekai genre, this endearing set-up isn't exactly revolutionary, and so as usual a lot of it comes down to how it's handled. From the beginning the show really leans into the contrast between the two words, focusing on the difference between the mundane streets of Tokyo and the mythic kingdoms of Ente Isla. Though it may be a generic world, Ente Isle seems to be fully-enough realized to act as an actual counterweight for the show's Japanese adventures, a gimmick that pulls a lot of weight. What also helps is how utterly serious everything in Ente Isla is: from the dramatic lofty church music to the stern faces of every lord and king we get a glimpse of, this is a place perpetually trapped in the dramatic stakes of a Tolkien story, something that goes a long way towards making Satan's bumbling adventures in Tokyo that much funnier.
However, while the contrast with Ente Isla is great, there isn't enough of it. For a show entirely predicated on the humor derived from putting medieval mythology into a modern setting, the mythology gets under-served. There's a thin trickle of problems that make their way over to harass the devil, but there's not enough focus on establishing these elements in their home world first. By the time characters arrive in Tokyo they've usually already pretty much instantly normalized their surroundings, and their mythic auras are curtailed before we get the chance to see them shine. What I'm really trying to say here is that I feel as though Ente Isle could have been an absolutely phenomenal source of drive for the story as a whole, with consistent cutaways to a slowly-mounting crusade intent on the final eradication of the Devil juxtaposed against him trying to handle tough customers as a cashier. The slow stream of scouts and assassins slowly mounting into a full-on clusterfuck war would have given the show the kind of overarching storyline that it really craved. As is, the show is kind of broken into somewhat-detailed but unrelated arcs that give temporary senses of direction but ultimately fall into that classic, horrid pitfall: they reset to the status quo at the end, at most adding another character to the main cast but never truly altering the dynamic. It's a bit of a bizarre dance because the truth is that what makes the show so compelling a lot of the time is the fact that it's clearly straining against this urge. There are multiple moments where characters have straightforward emotionally-charged conversations out of nowhere that directly and explicitly shift the future nature of their relationship. However, these shifts are clearly holding back, wanting to push the show forward but afraid to change too much lest the magic formula get shattered. The show asks some big questions about the contradictory natures of its characters, but, ultimately, it is afraid to give a real answer to any of them.
Speaking of the characters, the show for the most part triumphs with its main cast. Establishing a cast dynamic easy to invest in and open to lots of options can be quite difficult, but Satan and his general Alciel provide a rock-solid core by presenting a duo that is capable, endearing, randomly ignorant, and most of all mysterious. The cause for the shift in Satan's attitude upon arriving in Japan is one that plagues both the viewer and the rest of the show's cast, and the fact that we never see what he was really like back in Ente Isla adds to the confounding nature of his personality. On top of being intriguing, Satan and Alciel capitalize on their dual existence in everything they do, often relapsing into old speech or the fictional language of Ente Isla, framing their daily lives on a grand scale (they refer to their apartment as the 'castle', most dilemmas as 'battles', and their bicycle as 'Dullahan, the Trusty Steed'.) Though the depiction of their adjustment to Japan is rushed, the do the premise justice on a constant basis. The problem is that they are constantly degraded, both in-show and on a meta level, by the show's single most obvious problem: Emelia Yusa, the Hero. Framed as a foil to Satan, Emi the angelic legendary hero whose quest is the slay the Devil is riddled by every bullet the demon pair managed to dodge. Unsubtle, obnoxious, and cliche, Emi serves essentially to remind us that the Devil is supposed to be evil, and outside of a few scenes with legitimately earned dramatic weight she is written as an emotionally-volatile tsundere identical to every other character of the archetype. Her rampart immaturity, lack of confidence, and general inability create a mockery of the fantasy-real world dynamic that sabotages the self-serious vibe of the other world and actively detracts from the atmosphere-based humor by making Ente Isle seem like it's filled with samey high-school girls like anywhere else. Coupled with her complete lack of any traits, ticks or struggles indicating she used to live somewhere else and the fact that her already eye-rolling contributions to the humor are repeated as many times as possible, Emi is the show's most poorly-handled element. Her irreversible entrenchment at the heart of the show is the greatest thing holding it back.
The ACTUAL highschooler, on the other hand, is a totally different story. The show's token character that's actually from Japan is Satan's bubbly co-worker Chiho, and the weight that Emi drops she is more than ready to pick up. Endearingly earnest, simple, energetic, and adorable, Chiho is the foil Satan deserves. She's brash, she speaks her mind, she's strikingly more competent than the actual hero, and she's unabashedly a totally standard teenage girl who loves to dress up and go shopping and hang out with her friends and just also happens to be friends with Satan. Chiho's reckless involvement with the elements of Ente Isle and her endearing and wholesome relationships with both Satan and Alciel make her the light of the show, and the occasional melancholy the show dips into capitalizes on the bittersweet divide between her rather ordinary life and the grand scale of the world of Angels and Demons that she brushes up against every day. The show is honestly worth it just for Chiho and Satan's interactions, which is exactly the kind of dynamic that carries good comedies. Chiho is a complete success.
Finally, I want to touch on consistency and innovation. The show has one or two episodes that are actual duds, but the main problem is that it peaks around episode 5 with the resolution of its first arc. After that, the show stays funny, but it finds itself unable to mount a scenario to riff off of as compelling as its first one and suffers from an overall slight decline in the consistency of its humor. This of course is tied to the show's innovation: while several of its later episodes stand out as creative and uniquely enjoyable, the show's second actual arc is simply a re-spun version of its first one, utilizing several of the exact same details and gimmicks and, in spite of a new antagonist, it begins to feel rather cyclical. On top of this, the show dips into cliche comedy territory once or twice, yanking out the pool episode and haunted house episodes with no real unique characteristics, a sign that perhaps the creator was running low on ideas. The show never becomes truly repetitive, but it oftentimes fails to push its own limits, seeming to take the 'safe' route. While the second half does still have some real stunners and certain relationships continue to have meaningful development late into the show, a general decline in creativity and consistency makes me wish for what could have been if just a little more thought and effort had been put into expanding the story.
Overall, that's about how I feel about the show as a whole: that just a little more thought and effort could have tipped this show into the territory of truly great comedies. It half-succeeds at just about every criteria I laid out for great comedies, presenting reasonable consistency, a mostly-endearing cast, the makings of a driving overarching plot, and an acceptable amount of creativity, but never truly masters any of them. Considering when I watched it and the realness of the merits it DOES have, I'll always consider it a classic, but it will never quite reach the heights of stuff like Scrubs or Community or the Ranma 1/2 manga.
HOWEVER.
If you are looking for specifically ANIME comedy, I cannot recommend this show enough. I've watched just about every anime comedy that's been highly recommended to me, and I've enjoyed few of them enough to even finish them. The fact that I was still laughing out loud fairly often at this show when I had even already seen it before is extremely unique for me among anime comedies. I completely and totally understand the drive to seek out things that are specifically anime: while I would say "just go watch Community," there is an itch in all of us that only anime can scratch, and if you're feeling that way and wanna laugh and unwind with something fun, The Devil is a Part-Timer might be one of your very best bets. This show is no masterpiece, but it is very watchable by any standards, and if I were just comparing it to other straight anime comedies it's probably more like a 9. I'll keep trying those recommendations, but for now, I'm at least happy to know I can come back to this one.
