Show Cover

He’s so dark, you can’t even see him. He’s dissolved into the background.

# Review

Hosted by legendary Japanese comedian Hitoshi Matsumoto, the concept of the show is simple: ten comedians are locked in a room and are tasked to make eachother laugh. The last one laughing wins a cash prize of one million Japanese Yen. The antics start right away and escalate throughout the competition; being a Japanese game show, there really is no ceiling on the forms of humour deployed and the show quickly descends into chaos as the comedians resort to more and more aggressive jokes in a bid to make one another laugh.

I watched this when it first came out on Prime Video and I recently rewatched some parts of it. For a pedestrian viewer of Japanese comedy, I recognized some of the names of the participants, such as Jimmy Ohnishi, but I did not recognize the vast majority of the participants as few of them are well known outside of Japan. Despite this, the show was hilarious; Japanese humour has an extremely broad range, from crude slapstick to slow and elaborate setups; Japanese comedy is perhaps one of the most underrated forms of entertainment.

The set was also excellent and contained many props to use for jokes; furthermore, there was minimal editing done on the footage from the many cameras and the silence in between jokes added to the tension and the humour.

# Conclusion

A hilarious and novel game show format.

# Overall rating: 8.3

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