Comedy is a journey that can take many paths, no question about that.  There are times when a gag isn’t working where if you keep hammering long past the point where it feels too long, it starts to work somehow.  It’s high-risk to be sure because if it never reaches that point, you’ve created a disaster.  That was definitely the approach with Osomatsu-san (which has gone fully comedic ever since I remarked on how it was more introspective this season) took this week.  And I would say it mostly worked – not brilliantly, but pretty well.

• The konbini pre-open seems to be almost a weekly standard at this point.  Another rare pairing (KaraJyuushi) but nothing too notable beyond that in this brief vignette.
• The bad cop sketch was definitely one of those scenarios described above.  It wasn’t especially funny, but it reached a level of absurdity where it almost started to work.  Especially when Jyuushi and Osoyama were acting out their death scenes over and over.
• If nothing else, this is interesting as a window into how cliches in bad Japanese cop dramas are different than American ones, and where they overlap.
• The big sketch here is “Kakurenbo”.  And it takes that theory and cranks it up to eleven.
• Most of these individual sketches-within-a-sketch worked for me.  Like Jyuushimatsu hiding in impossible places, and the 8-bit “Search for Totty” routine that turned everything into a sort of Where’s Waldo spinoff.
• Fourth wall breaking is something Osomatsu-san does plenty of, of course.  But acknowledging the crappy treatment of animators is still pretty taboo (especially at a studio like Pierrot).  There are no third rails for Osomatsu-san, though.