Yuyushiki Final Thoughts--Pigeons Are Always Funny

I tried to like this, but apparently there's only so many random outbursts that I can take.

 
I've found myself in a strange position that I haven't really experienced before. By all indicators, Yuyushiki should've been a show that I enjoyed. Slice-of-life comedies that have little to no point with a mostly female cast tend to draw me in for reasons I'm still exploring. However, with Yuyushiki, for the first time I found myself agreeing with the detractors of the genre. More often than not, to me it felt forced, repetitive, and not very funny. Why was that?

 
I think that the answer has to do with Yuyushiki's brand of humor, and that it just didn't click with me. The jokes are mostly circular, with the repetition of a buzzword throughout a scene, sometimes with different voice inflections, and then Yui acting as the straight man and calling the other two stupid. I didn't find these "random" sections funny, yet they make up the majority of the show. I often found myself pausing the episodes and coming back to them hours later, since I either couldn't take too much of one joke at once, or it got old so quickly that I would try to forget about it before going back to it. I probably would've been more receptive to it had this show been a five-minute short, since a whole episode of the same formula felt like an eternity to me sometimes.

 
However, I did keep watching because of some moments early on that did make me laugh. I found the internet searches and the subsequent drawings on the white board amusing (except when it went off into buzzword territory like what I described above). The sections were they responded to something relatable (like Yui breaking down in school because she didn't get enough sleep) and the truly random moments (the pigeon scene) were what convinced me not to drop the show. However, for every small moment that I genuinely liked, it felt like there were twenty more scenes of the group at Yui's house, doing nothing but acting "random." As a side note to that, my opinion on the slight yuri elements is unchanged from the first episode; they felt shoehorned in and made otherwise mellow scenes feel unintentionally creepy. I was disappointed.


But even with all of that said, I can see why the fans of this show really like it. It's a bit quirkier than the norm, and more willing to be upfront about its characters' motives (read: the yuri) than most others in this genre. However, comedy by its nature is divisive--what one person finds hilarious, another person could find annoying. The comedy here just didn't work for me. If you want to give this show a try, you'll likely know how it'll work out for you after the first episode. If you love it, keep going. If you feel that the "random" sections aren't that funny, then it's better to not continue.

Images from Crunchyroll.com.