Japanese Comedy through the Ages: Rakugo and Shoten

お知らせ： 皆様が読んで下さって、ありがとうございます。面白いことがあれば、僕は本当に嬉しいです。「ダグ、筆者」

Like every culture, comedy has taken on many forms in Japan, but one form that remains still very popular (at least in the older generation) are the famous rakugo (落語) stories. These are funny folk stories that usually originate from the old capitol of Edo (now Tokyo) and still are told in the old Edo-dialect, which to modern Japanese speakers, sounds old, but still understandable. Similar to how Americans can understand “pirate talk” even though it’s very outdated.¹

Rakugo stories are still very popular today and told to younger generations as well. My daughter has a number of rakugo books we’ve purchased on Amazon JP and shipped here to the US. One of our favorites is the story of “Toki Soba” (時そば, Time Soba). In this story, a man goes to eat soba at a nearby restaurant and then goes to pay. As he pays the coins one at a time, like so, “one, two, three…” he asks the shopkeep what time it is, and the owner replies back “nine [o' clock]“, and the customer cleverly counts from there “ten, eleven..” and saves himself some money.

Someone else tries this trick, but gets into a lot of hilarious trouble. In another story, Bake mono Tsukai (化け物つかい, “Ghost Helper”), a retired old man is living alone, when he’s visited by various ghosts and monsters each night. Instead of being scared, he makes them to do the housework until finally at the end, it’s revealed that all the monsters were the same tanuki who finally gives up.

But while Rakugo stories are fun to read, they are stories meant to be told in person because of all the voices and acting involved.

My wife, daughter and I watch a certain TV show called Shōten (笑点) which is a venerable, long-running comedy show in Japan that has been on-air every Monday evening since 1968! The host, Katsura Utamaru (桂 歌丸, born 1936) is actually a master of rakugo and often begins the show by telling a rakugo story. This is an older clip from a rakugo story he is telling, though not on Shoten:

It’s very interesting to watch how one story-teller can do all the parts so convincingly (03:00 onward in the video), and the Japanese, while old, is still somewhat understandable even by modern students, though there are lots of old words in there. Indeed, it’s probably fair to say that modern, standard Japanese is more or less descended from Edo-dialect more so than other dialects (e.g. Kansai dialect).

As for the rest of Shōten, they have one great segment they do every episode, where several entertainers sit on piles of cushions, and Katsura leads them in a kind of improv comedy. If one of them does something funny, he gets another cushion on his pile. If he does something crass or silly, he loses one or all. The number of cushions carries over into the next week’s episode too. Because the same people appear in every episode, it’s more about then fun, than winning, but it’s a pretty entertaining show. He’s a small clip from a commercial they did:

You can see how everyone is wearing different colored robes (they wear the same ones every episode). Also the theme song is pretty famous too.

It’s a kind of old-fashioned, comedy you don’t see as much in the US anymore. Sometimes the jokes get too crass though,² so we have to turn it off, so my daughter doesn’t hear. But, I enjoy watching it with my family even though I understand maybe about 10% of it. My wife stated that because there’s a lot of word-play and witty comedy, it’s pretty advanced Japanese, so any language-student who can understand it well and appreciate the humor has a good reason to be proud.

Me? I have a long ways to go.

That’s a brief look at Japanese comedy through the ages.

¹ Speaking of American “pirates”, I think I had too much fun during my last trip to Disneyland. ;p

² In my experience some jokes that seem crass to Americans are normal in Japanese culture, while some kinds of American humor aren’t really popular in Japan. I had the same experience in Ireland too where American and Irish humor were somewhat different from each other, even though they speak the same language.