Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out!

Episodes 1-2

We should maybe get something out of the way up front: Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out! is, by every indication of these first two episodes, not a show I am particularly inclined to like. If you want the full scope of why the premiere didn't work for me, the Summer Preview Guide will fill you in, but the long and short of it is that it simply wasn't funny.The dumb jokes about Uzaki's disproportionately large breasts were especially annoying, but even when the show was just making jokes about how the titular Uzaki really wants to hang out with the not-at-all interested Shinichi, I just didn't laugh. There are no worse first impressions a comedy can make than that.

Now, I want to make it clear that I am not going into each and every episode of Uzaki-chan determined to hate the show. Even though I was bracing myself for the worst, I went into the second episode wanting to like it. The good news? Episode Two managed to almost make me laugh precisely one time! To be clear, every single thing leading up to the scene where Uzaki got stuck in a bush, with her uncovered ass just hanging out in the breeze for Shinichi to smack for some reason, was terrible and dumb in a decidedly lame way. The very next joke, though, where the two girls spot Shinichi trying to free Uzaki from her leafy prison, and it looks very much like he's the one trying to get unstuck from a particularly tangled bush? That, my friends, was a joke so goddamned idiotic and juvenile that it transcended every layer of critical thought I've honed over the years and hit me right in the corroded lizard-brain part of my mind that got scorched by late-night Adult Swim binges in my high school years. I didn't quite laugh, but I snorted breath out of my nose like how when you're browsing social media and you see a meme that's sort of amusing. So, credit where credit is due, I guess.

The bad news is that the other 99% of Uzaki-chan's second episode was largely just as bad as its premiere, and what's worse is that it isn't even the kind of terrible that is easy to spin into interesting commentary. This isn't like Vatican Miracle Examiners, where a pair of sexy Catholic Priests do battle with Hitler's evil brainwashed clone and the Nazi sex cult that spawned him by lighting everything on fire with sulfuric acid (Yes, this is a real thing that happened). There's nothing ugly or obscene about Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out! — it just doesn't seem to understand how comedy works. So, unless the show drastically improves and gives me something to actually analyze or comment on, I will be forced to do the thing that literally nobody on the planet wants me to do: Explain why the jokes aren't funny.

Good humor is all about setting up a certain expectation, or playing off of preexisting assumptions and biases, and then upending them somehow. Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out! makes the same mistake so many terrible anime comedies do and mistakes “characters being odd and then having other characters point it out” as being inherently funny. Take, for instance, the very title of the episode: "The Café Owner Wants a Glimpse!" On the surface, this is based on the fact that there is one scene where the boss of the café that Shinichi works at, who is normally very chill and laid back, gets a little too excited by Uzaki's bouncing bosoms. I imagine that the original Japanese title also works as a kind of pun based on how the manager also enjoys watching the two kids banter back and forth, though that doesn't really play in English. As for the “forcing the audience to watch an old man pop a chub over a college girl's curves” thing, it only barely qualifies as a joke because of the established precedent of the owner usually being all quiet and reserved. Thus, our expectations are subverted when he's revealed to be horny. I cannot stress enough that this is probably the most well-crafted joke in the episode: “Huge tatas make old man act funny.” Roll on snare drum.

Or how about when Shinichi decides to put on a polite face and serve Uzaki some coffee, and Uzaki burst out cackling like a madwoman because she can't reconcile his polite service with his “villainous mug”. This would only qualify as funny if Shinichi actually displayed any personality traits outside of “bland annoyance”, or if the one calling him out for being antisocial wasn't so obscenely and obliviously annoying herself. Then there's when Uzaki refuses to stop pestering Shinichi from across the dining hall, and gets distracted by irritating him with a bunch of texts messages. After what seems like an eternity of buildup, the punchline is…Uzaki spent so much time on the phone that her noodles got all soggy. I actually had to rewind the scene and watch it again to make sure I didn't miss some obvious setup for this, or a double-entendre, or anything that would make that scene mean anything. Soggy noodles? That isn't a joke! It's just an observation of what happens when you ignore your soup!

“Uzaki wants to play baseball…but her back crumbles to dust under the weight of her bosom!” “Uzaki is bad a writing essays…and look at how silly she is with her boobs propped up on the table!” “Shinichi is rightfully mortified that two underage girls thought he was doing some public hedge-trimming in Uzaki's backyard!” There are so many scenes across these two episodes that amount to absolutely nothing because the show just assumes that “Grumpy guy is forced to hang out with an incredibly annoying girl whose only other defining characteristics are her giant bazongas” is the laugh-riot premise of the season. Will Uzaki and her gravity-defying boobies turn Shinichi's college-days around? God help me, I guess we've got another ten weeks or so to find out.

Rating:

Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out! is currently streaming on Funimation.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.