You know it’s going good when even the stalker can’t spoil things.

Yes, that is a category tag.  This was definitely the week where Aharen-san wa Hakarenai closed the deal for me.  And unexpectedly quickly, too – I had VIP seating on the bubble reserved for this show, but this episode just clicked.  I certainly haven’t given up on Shikimori-san, but it seems like this is the series that’s going to slip into that slot for me this season – the quirky, easy to watch, feel-good comedy.  And the fact that it was my main sleeper pick for the season just makes the taste a little sweeter.

Comedy is funny in the less literal sense – it works or it doesn’t.  I liked the first two eps but it all just sort of crystalized here.  The basic formula is built around Raidou’s overactive imagination more than anything.  He always cooks up elaborately preposterous scenarios which he believes resolutely, and Aharen is the perfect canvas on which he can paint his delusions.  She’s weird too, and barely communicative – she feeds his fantasies as surely as she feeds his stomach meatballs.  And the great thing is that these are such classic schoolboy mental concoctions – quite innocent as well as humorous.

This, in the end, is the key.  Aharen-san and Raidou-kun are totally loveable goofballs and I adore both of them.  They’re as sweet and kind as they are weirdos, and their affection for each other is totally genuine.  This is a gag comedy and as such some chapters will, well- make you gag.  But they all worked this week – even the stalker one was more than tolerable (though the ones without her were certainly better).  Raidou’s idea of why Aharen’s hair looked the way it did (“She must be a head-banger!”) was hilariously Raidou to the core.  And the whole haircut/lip balm/hand cream sequence was oddly bittersweet somehow.  Plus, I loved Raidou’s motivation to pocket his haircut money even if it meant the risk of baldness…

The bit with the desks was both hilarious and sweet (that word again).  Raidou stressing over being separated was the spine of the episode, but the whole sequence of solutions for her seeing the blackboard was great.  Aharen-san wa Hakarenai is very good at these surrealistic montages, and we seem to get about one per week.  And of course pushing their desks together is the most obvious and simple solution and it’s arrived at last (that’s the joke), and also the perfect one.  They get there in the end, these two, though the ridiculous routes they take are the whole point of the premise.

Then we get the softball bit, which was more of the series in straight-up comic mode.  The cracking-stretching bit was just a good sight (and sound gag), and then the bit with the strike zone, ROFL (Google “Eddie Gaedel” if you don’t know who he is).  It’s Raidou-kun’s imagination unleashed again (competition against Aharen-san really seems to get him going).  This all builds to the dancing bit, which was just incredibly sweet (sorry) and hilarious on every level.  This was a case where Raidou (he of the 17 Utube views) has his fantasy go unchallenged for days, and it builds to an entire life plan.  I’m kind of sad it didn’t turn out to actually be true, to be honest – that would be fun to watch.

In the end the desk situation worked out exactly as I expected – the joke was that after all his grinding over it Raidou winds up next to Aharen again (in the same seats).  That’s as it should be, of course – sometimes delivering the expected is the right thing for a comedy to do.  And the way Raidou thought about this whole scenario was such a fine reflection of what a good boy he is.  When Aharen confessed about being sad at the idea of being separated (one of the things I like about these two is that they’re quite refreshingly blunt with each other) that was a really sweet (sorry) moment. Aharen-san wa Hakarenai has a formula that seems likely to hold up very well, and it’s doing an awful lot of things right at the moment.