When I took my first shot at learning Japanese, nothing stuck. I would learn new kanji or grammar, then it would fly out of my head in a week. It took me three months to realize I had to escape my bubble of textbooks and memorization and experience some Japanese in the wild. Unfortunately, I lived across from a cow pasture in South Carolina, so I couldn’t just find some place where people spoke Japanese. Instead, I decided to watch a comedy show called Gaki no Tsukai ya Arahende.
In my home office, on the wall, you can find the Hall of Fame for the Best Decisions I Have Ever Made. I keep track of all my best decisions there, on fake plaques printed on A4 paper. Near the very top, just below “Decided Not to Go to Grad School,” you can find “Decided to Watch the Best Comedy Show of All Time and Learned Japanese While Doing It.”
I bet you can guess what show I’m talking about?
What is Gaki no Tsukai?
Downtown no Gaki no Tsukai ya Arahende!! is a Japanese comedy and variety show which has been running since 1989, producing over a thousand episodes. It has been a massively influential show in Japanese comedy, to the point that the main duo’s Kansai accent and dialect are the unofficial sound of comedy in the country. If you want to become a Japanese comedian, you better learn to talk like you’re from Osaka.
The show’s influence has even creeped just across the Pacific Ocean, with one fantastic Gaki no Tsukai segment called Silent Library being adapted into a full show on MTV. Virtually everyone will tell you that the original was better, but don’t let that stop you from watching Justin Bieber smell a durian. The original product is embedded below:
You can find all sorts of comedy under the Gaki no Tsukai umbrella: from old-fashioned “Who’s on First”-style manzai dialogues to sketches, game shows, cooking segments, public stunts, and the physical comedy that Japan is famous for. Gaki no Tsukai is especially famous for its batsu games: devilish and sometimes intricate scenarios in which one or more of the performers are comically punished for losing a competition, a bet, or just because it’s New Year’s Day. Gaki‘s New Year’s 24 Hours No Laughing specials are hours-long batsu games in which the comedians are forced to endure increasingly bizarre and hilarious scenarios with the caveat that they will be beaten if they laugh out loud.
Here’s a famous segment from one of the 24 Hours No Laughing shows in which returning character Jimmy Onishi does his very best to teach an English lesson. You can see the Gaki no Tsukai cast being constantly pulled away and hit when they laugh.
Just watching the video, I can tell you that I wouldn’t come out of it alive if I were in any one of their shoes.
Studying Japanese With Gaki No Tsukai
Gaki no Tsukai is worth watching for anyone with an interest in comedy, but it’s especially useful for students in the early stages of learning Japanese. There is a vast library of Gaki clips, episodes, and specials online which have been subtitled by fans, allowing anyone to watch and start to absorb the language in-between study periods. And thanks to the habit of the show (and all Japanese television, really) to put a lot of the spoken words on screen in text to highlight punch lines, you can almost match spoken words with Japanese text with English text all at once, which was helpful to me very early on in learning the language.
And because Gaki no Tsukai is largely a physical comedy show, you can make do without subtitles altogether without being afraid that you won’t have any idea what’s going on. Once you get much stronger with your language ability, there is a large and friendly fansubbing community that can help you practice the language as you subtitle clips and episodes on your own (and trust me, you can’t do much worse than some of the translations that are already out there). As you improve in ability, there is a very natural progression of Gaki no Tsukai clips that can help reinforce what you learn when you study, and even start to get your feet wet in the translation world if you are so inclined.
It makes for a step-by-step process:
1. If you’re a complete beginner like I was, watch the show with subtitles between study sessions. Usually, punch lines will be written out in big Japanese text on the screen, so you can practice reading katakana and hiragana, and test your kanji if any simple ones happen to come up. It’s useful to have Japanese spoken words, Japanese text, and English text on screen all at once when you’re just a beginner. If you’re doing it right, your brain should hurt after you’ve watched an episode or two. That means you’re getting some value out of your leisure time.
2. If you know a little bit of the language, be brave and watch the show without English subtitles. Especially if you’ve already seen an episode or two, missing a sentence here or there won’t hurt your enjoyment of this physical comedy-heavy show. I’ve found it important to immerse myself as much as possible as my language skill got better, and this is an easy place to start.
3. And if you’re really starting to know your stuff, Gaki no Tsukai is a friendly place to dip your toes into the world of translation. There is a huge community of people who watch subtitled Gaki no Tsukai content online, and in a show with 1,213 episodes, there is always more material to translate. By either learning to subtitle video yourself or working with another fan who wants to be a timer, you can start to subtitle Gaki clips and publish them online, trying out all the joys and pains of translation before turning it into a paying gig.
Introducing The Comedians
The core cast of Gaki no Tsukai is comprised of two separate comedy duos and… another guy. “Downtown” are the senior duo who introduce the show and have been with it from the start. “Cocorico” are a duo who joined in 1997, and Yamasaki Hosei (who recently changed his name to Tsukitei Hosei) is the solo act.
Downtown
Hamada Masatoshi
Hamada is what is known in the Japanese comedy world as the tsukkomi. In the Anglo-American comedy world, this is what’s known as the “straight man.” Not the full-on no-jokes straight man a la Zeppo Marx, but the dominant, smart member of the comedy duo with Matsumoto.
It’s all based around the core interaction of Japanese comedy that you might recognize from any other video game, comic, or movie with elements of comic relief: Matsumoto is the funny man, so he acts like an idiot. Hamada is the straight man, so he yells at Matsumoto and hits him for being so stupid. Hamada plays a sadistic, mean, and almost evil character that is perfectly matched to Matsumoto’s goofier nature.
Among Hamada’s running gags: He always gets stuck wearing women’s clothes, and the other members of the group take every opportunity they can to compare him to a gorilla. He’s also… not a great artist.
Matsumoto Hitoshi
Matsumoto is the elder statesman of Japanese comedy and the boke to Hamada’s tsukkomi. He’s taller than Hamada, he’s balder, and while he has the same temper, he doesn’t have the mean streak to back it up. He’s the funny man, and in the few times that the comedy isn’t physical, he tends to land the punch lines. Recently, Matsumoto has started a career in directing and writing movies, including two that made it Stateside in limited release: Big Man Japan and R100.
Cocorico
Tanaka Naoki
Cocorico (sometimes spelled “Coq au rico”) are a much younger duo, and while their characters within Gaki no Tsukai aren’t so fleshed out as Downtown, they still play huge roles throughout the show. Tanaka is the boke and he’s a tall, thin, gentle-hearted guy who is perhaps best known for dropping immediately to the ground whenever he’s even remotely startled.
Endo Shozo – Endo is the tsukkomi, but despite being the more serious member of the duo, most of his running gags on Gaki no Tsukai revolve around his being kind of an airhead. Sometimes the team will make him read something full of slightly obscure kanji just to watch him try to figure them out.
He’s also punished on the show for his semi-scandalous private life, and his ex-wife (the singer Chiaki) is often brought on to the show to create awkward situations for him.
Some other guy named Hosei
Yamasaki or Tsukitei Hosei
Yamasaki recently changed his name to Tsukitei just to make things difficult for someone trying to write a Gaki no Tsukai intro piece, but more importantly he’s the chubby underdog of the group. His punch lines never land and he seems to always take more physical abuse than anyone else, but he’s visibly trying his hardest to live up to the comedy standards of the others around him.
Yamasaki isn’t actually an unfunny comedian by any means, but he plays one on TV, and his character is supposed to be bad at his comedy job. In the last seven or so of Gaki no Tsukai’s New Year’s specials, some sort of unfortunate mix-up or other gets Yamasaki viciously slapped by the pro wrestler Masahiro Chono, one of the most popular running gags in the show for the way that Yamasaki tries desperately to escape his punishment.
Now Go Watch It!
Now you should be ready to dive into the hundreds of online clips of Gaki no Tsukai and start to love Japanese comedy. And if you’re like me, you’ll move on to Lincoln, and Million Kazoku, and on and on, looking for that next comedy fix until you’re desperately walking into another DVD store, looking for a rakugo scene you’ve never watched before while knowing you won’t find it. You’ll be living in a batsu game of your own creation, and there’s no escape.
Until that happens to you, though, I’d like to provide you with some of my favorite Gaki No Tsukai clips to watch.
“Matsumoto’s Pie Hell” is one of my favorite moments from the show. After losing a bet on the Japan Series, Hamada and the rest of the team subject Matsumoto to a full simulated day of pie attacks. Matsumoto must do everything the narrator tells him to do and pretend this is just a normal day, without reacting to the constant barrage of pies.
The “5 Rangers” clip below is a positively ancient Gaki sketch about a Super Sentai or Power Rangers team who fail to coordinate their outfits for the day. It’s a simple premise that has led to maybe a few dozen segments on the show, but I laugh every single time. This segment predates Cocorico and Yamasaki, but you should start with the original before you fast forward a decade or two.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3J9vQC02pI
The “Kiki” series is one of my favorite segments from the show, in which the cast taste something blindfolded, then try to pick it out from a table of alternate brands of the same thing. You can see them taste-test curry, instant miso soup, and even cigarettes and beer, but you should start with the first Kiki game: canned coffee.
And Gaki no Tsukai has another fantastic food segment called “Absolutely Tasty,” in which the cast cook some, uh, inventive food items along a common theme then try them out together. The finished products can range anywhere from delicious recipes you’ll want to try at home to horrifying, borderline inedible creations.
Before Gaki did 24 Hour No Laughing games every year, they had a different endurance challenge: A 24 hour game of tag. While the cast were trying to sleep, men would occasionally burst into the room and start chasing them down, with whoever is caught being subjected to some kind of punishment. In this clip, it’s a Scorpion Death Lock wrestling move, but Tanaka has a special strategy for avoiding it.
I couldn’t get away without including what I will politely call “The Butt Game.” This used to show up on those “weird Japan” shows and websites, and you’ll see why shortly. Matsumoto and Yamasaki work together to answer trivia questions. If they get one wrong, the producers’ three quarters-naked butts get moved inches closer to their face. The highest of stakes.
In this clip, the team try to order Napolitan, the Japanese pasta dish, using similar-sounding words, starting with “Napoleon” and working all the way down to “Tamori-san.” If they receive what they ordered, they win.
This clip introduces you to Heipo, a popular side character who is afraid of absolutely everything. The comedians take turns scaring him with increasingly simple techniques.
I couldn’t possibly link enough videos to show you the depth and breadth of Gaki laughs out there, but this is a start. So do what I did years ago: Pull up a chair and a laptop to watch the show, and maybe some headphones so you don’t bother the people around you, and a second, smaller laptop with jisho.org open on it, and a bag of kettle corn, and some kind of wipe to get the kettle corn off your hands before you touch your keyboard, and enjoy Gaki no Tsukai ya Arahende. And maybe you’ll learn something while you do.
Bonus Wallpapers!
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