Tangemania

I have been thinking a lot about Japanese comedy these last few years. It started not just with watching lots of film comedy, but also with going frequently to comedy halls in Japan, from yose vaudeville halls to theaters that feature manzai acts or even stand-up comedy. I taught a course in Japanese comedy in 2022, I put on a live comedy event called Verbal Arts of Japan in 2023, and even did a review of a recent book on rakugo for Monumeta Nipponica. 

My most recent endeavor has been to program a series featuring some of the great works of Japanese film comedy. This was not easy to do. While comedy has been a central genre in Japanese film history, few foreign festivals have programmed it and not many scholars have studied it—why is an interesting problem—so there are actually not many English subtitled film prints. The National Film Archive of Japan had a pretty good collection of prewar films, but I had to rely on the Japan Foundation for postwar films. Even then, some of the legendary series like the “Irresponsible” series featuring the Crazy Cats could not be shown because there are no subtitled prints. We also had problems with one of the film companies, which did not give us permission in time, so we had to cancel an Enoken film. Still, we came up with a pretty good set of films.