There are a few certainties when you visit Japan. The trains will run on time, the customer service will be exceptional and the TV schedules will be clogged up with variety shows. 

These shows will be full of giggling pundits commenting on the day’s news, interviewing celebrities or partaking in outrageous stunts. This type of comedy is called ‘owarai’ and it is thought around 70-80 percent of these pundits are comedians. 

The variety show format is prevalent because they are entertaining, cheap to produce and require very little rehearsal time. All they need is funny talent to consistently crack jokes in order to make the show zip along at breakneck speed. You’ll notice that many of these comedians come in pairs, and that’s because these double acts perform a popular form of Japanese comedy called ‘manzai’. 

This involves a deadpan comic performing alongside a comic who specialises in more expressive and slapstick comedy. When they appear on variety shows together they will normally perform sketches in the studio or in filmed segments as they travel to places throughout Japan and around the world. They tend to interview locals, sample food, or perform pranks. 

And with more and more variety shows on TV, each one has to be unique in order to attract a wide audience and stay on the air. And in a lot of cases, pranks which derive comedy through physical pain tend to draw the biggest audiences.

These stunts are called batsu (“punishment”) which is where losers of a game have to face some sort of penalty, which have to be seen to be believed. 

In an interview with Wired Magazine, Hiroshi Osaki, president of Yoshimoto Kogyo, a major Japanese entertainment conglomerate and employer of most of the country’s comedy talent said “Some people say that comedy should be nice and clean. That’s just not so. People retain a vicious sense of humor and a vicious nature.” 

Some can trace the origins of this vicious sense of humour to the 1986 game show series ‘Takeshi’s Castle’ which features Takeshi Kitano (who is now an acclaimed filmmaker) as the lord of a fantasy realm, which he rules from his castle. Contestants attempt to storm the castle, but in order to do so they need to take part in madcap games such as avoiding being knocked off narrow beams by foam baseball bats; jumping out the way of rolling boulders on steep inclines and crossing muddy terrain via a zip wire. The final showdown with Takeshi involved a surreal demolition derby involving people in colorful costumes.

The show tapped into the computer game craze of the 80s and 90s when Nintendo and Sega dominated the popular culture landscape. Much like the games on these home consoles, Takeshi’s Castle focused on completing different levels of varying difficulty which culminated in big-boss battles that involved cartoon-like violence. It was hugely popular and was exported around the world until it finished in 1990. 

With the success of Takeshi’s Castle, more and more networks pounced on shows featuring batsu. One popular show was ‘Downtown no Gaki no Tsukai ya Arahende’ –hosted by the manzai duo Downtown. It began in 1989 and is still shown on TV.

As with many comedians in Japan, no matter how accomplished their stand-up routine is, they are often overshadowed by their batsu challenges which tends to result in public humiliation. And this has happened with the Downtown duo, who are now synonymous for some truly outrageous stunts. Punishments have included being slapped 300 times, getting hit in the groin with a Chinko machine and getting your face squashed by a sumo wrestler’s butt. My personal favorite is the ‘Silent Library’ challenge, whereby contestants must remain silent despite trying to make each other laugh. It was such a popular concept that it was exported to other countries. MTV picked it up and had members of the WWE take part in the game, with hilarious consequences. Another popular variety show is Tonneruzu no Minasan no Okage deshita fronted by the comedy pair, Tunnels. Games on their show are a bit more toned-down and includes the compelling ‘Human Tetris’ game, where people have to contort their body to fit varying hole sizes cut into a styrofoam wall which closes in on contestants. This proved so popular that rights to the show have been sold to 45 countries including the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom.

As you can imagine, these provide for some funny and shocking moments and make for some great reaction shots which appear in the corner of the screen. These reaction shots are a staple of Japanese TV and are part of the highlight of batsu challenges, as seen from this clip which shows a group of comedians trying to pronounce Massachusetts with disastrous results. 

As the stunts have become crazier, Japanese game shows are now notorious overseas and are often watched with open mouths. These priceless reactions from a group of Americans reaffirms this notion. Subsequently, they have been lampooned in TV shows such as Saturday Night Live, which features Mike Myers’ sadistic quizmaster gleefully torturing a losing contestant by electrocuting his private parts. 

And in 2008, a reality show from ABC called ‘I Survived a Japanese Game Show’ became a big hit on US TV. The show consisted of a group of Americans travelling to Japan to take part in a Japanese-style game show with challenges like “Big Chicken Butt Scramble” “Big Baby Go Boom” and “Sticky Sticky Bang Bang”. The winner who scored the most points over the season took home $250,000. The first season was a ratings smash and spawned a second season, with viewers eager to see more jaw-dropping antics and even more baffling challenges with equally preposterous names such as “Gopher Make U Crazy” “Alien Took My Teddy Bear” and “Somebody Put Clothes On Bob”. 

Even if you have no desire to find out if they succeeded in putting clothes on Bob, you’ll no doubt witness other madcap challenges on Japanese TV as they are hard to avoid. Who knows, you may even take pleasure in seeing hapless comedians commit unspeakable acts that can’t be unseen. And in this social media age, these shows are ripe to share and laugh about with friends. And if that happens, it’s mission accomplished for the comedians.