I’ll say up front, that restaurant sketch was one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long time, but I don’t have a clue how to write about it.

Why do I get the feeling this week’s episode was written by the cast?  I’m sure it wasn’t actually (with one possible exception) but it really seemed like a showcase for them to totally cut loose and act (literally) like idiots.  Like, even more than normal.

• “Nothing I can do” was just straight-up nihilistic and depressing.
• The “Meidou Oden” bit was every bit as disturbing as I suspect it was intended to be, but a great platform for Kokuryu Sachi to show off her chops.  Especially when Chibita drank the hot soup.
• “No Chance” was probably the second-funniest sketch of the week, but that gap was huge.  If you could pick any of the sextuplets to be your judge, I would think Totty would be the worst.
• Not much to say about the mosquito number apart from Kamiya Hiroshi was clearly having way too much fun doing it.
• The bit with Osomatsu as the neighborhood creeper was genuinely sad.  That whole “Tortoise and the Hare” retelling had the unerring ring of truth to it.  That sketch didn’t go where I expected it to (happily) but where it went was dark in a good way.
• Ditto the mosquito bit for Karamtsu as the bartender – that was just a pretext for Nakamura Yuuichi to riff.

That, however, brings us to the magnum opus of the evening, “A Restaurant Filled With Mysteries”.  This was straight-up ROTFL hilarious to me, though I suspect one of those cases where humor is the most subjective form of entertainment there is.  The visuals were tremendous in setting the mood, but this was all about Ono Daisuke.  It was a comic tour-de-force – the timing, the inflection, everything.  And I strongly suspect he was improvising for at least parts of it, like where he was reading stuff off the “menu” and kept changing the names (he is reputed to be an extreme goofball).  This just clicked with me – the concept (a “niche country” resto from the “back side of the Himalayas, LOL), the execution, the dialogue, the hand gestures.  Absurdist comedy at its most brilliant.