Wait a minute – has Akatsuka-sensei’s face always been on the bills in this show?

A confession to start – when Karamatsu was talking about Mahjong, what I basically heard was the teacher from the Peanuts TV specials.  I know absolutely nothing about the game whatsoever apart from that it’s Asian and George Costanza’a mother played it – in fact I have no idea if what the brothers were playing was even real Mahjong or some kind of of bastardized comedy version of it (up until the point where it was obviously a bastardized comedy version of it).

That this skit could still manage to strike me pretty funny is a testament to the universal language of comedy and the comedic skills of Osomatsu-san.  This definitely wasn’t one of the deeper chapters so far – apart from some ruthless fun at the expense of each Matsu’s psychology the engine here was mostly powered on abject stupidity and delightful nonsense.  But it worked quite well on a superficial level.

The Kamimatsu sketch was much more my speed, going beyond the slapstick into something much more conceptual.  I loved the way the premise was introduced – with the feckless Jyuushimtsu becoming aware that something very weird was going on and being too freaked out to say anything.  That something is Kamimatsu (Nojima Kenji), a Buddha-like incarnation of Matsuhood formed when the goodness which dropped off the brothers (from disuse) gathered itself together and birthed him.

It’s pretty easy to see where this is going to end up – even the best of circumstances somebody like Kamimatsu would be a pretty annoying guy to have tailing you all the time.  When you’re unabashed NEETs and losers the problem is amplified, because Kamimatsu’s most obvious impact is to constantly show up just how deficient the rest of the brothers are in every conventional sense.  The straw that breaks the camel’s back is when he not just makes the brothers look bad to their long-suffering parents, but compounds the indignity by defending them.  But their plot to kill him backfires by forcing even more good to slough off them and be absorbed by Kamimatsu, who promptly levels up and gets a date (and much more, seemingly) from Totoko.

As for the way the chapter ended up, I’m not sure if there was a deeper message intended here or if it was just played for laughs.  But either way, we got Sugita Tomokazu as Akumatsu, who’s being comprised of the brothers’ evil (which there’s plenty of to spare, supposedly) is naturally much bigger than Kamimatsu.  I’m not sure there’s a message for humanity in all this, but somehow I don’t think that’s a terribly high priority for Osomatsu-san at this point.