Laughing Japan

M-1 Grandprix

The most popular comedy genre in Japan is called Manzai. It's very simliar to Western style stand-up-comedy, but normally performed by two comedians together. They are called boke and tsukkomi. The boke will talk a lot of strange things, which the tsukkomi will comment  about.

Each year, more than 3000 comedian-duos compete in a big manzai-competition called "M-1 Grandprix". The finals are shown on TV around christmas, the winner will get a prize money of more than 72,000 Euros. Of course, normally only professional and succesful comedians are able to reach the final, but in general the competition is open to everyone. I have also joined the competition, together with my Japanese partner Harbor we perform under the name of "Altbayern". On sunday the 10th we took part in the first round here in Osaka.

On this day, 101 manzai-teams (mainly duos) competed for the right to proceed to the second round. While normally a manzai-performance can be longer than 10 minutes, in this firt round each team was only allowed to perform for two minutes. Two minutes can be very short. Harbor had written a script which was only two pages long, which took us just the allowed two minutes to perform: In the script I play the rhole of a stupid shop assistant (boke), while Harbor is the annoyed customer.

Everything went smooth for us. While we witnessed some other comedians forgetting their lines on stage, we managed well and even got the audience to laugh about us. Being the only foreigner doing manzai that day, I appeared a bit outstanding and got interviewed by the staff several times. So maybe I will be on the M1-DVD later? ;)

After all 101 performance were finished, the judges announced that 17 teams were chosen to be allowed to go to round 2. Among the team-names we also heard our name "Altbayern". We had made it! We had been able to survive the first round and beat a big numer of competitors. We are very happy and are looking forward to the next round :)

They did it! The Elevator-Joke!

On July 15th I reported about the birth of a new joke here in Japan, a joke mainly dealing with the sad affair of a fatal accident involving an elevator produced by the company Schindler. In the end of the article I wrote that "I can't wait to hear the first comedian telling the audience about the elevators".

Last weekend, I finally heard it. The first comedians doing a joke about Schindler. It was the comedy-duo Charanporan, in one of their stand-up-dialogues which are famous in Japan as "Manzai". They were talking about their life styles and one of them started to tell the audience about the terrible place where his partner was living: A terrible dirty room in a terrible part of town etc etc and, the worst, the buildings elevator being a Schindler-one. The audience bursted into laughter and I started to smile, not being all that amused about the joke, but being a little bit proud that I had sort of predicted such kind of jokes from the mouth of a comedian two months before.