Forget Durarara, Angel Beats, and Hidamari Sketch; when it comes to anime series still on the air, Gintama is where it's at!
Now, a confession; there are a few anime series I think are funny as Hell. Namely: Haruhi, Welcome to the NHK, Soul Eater, and Sgt. Frog. There's one problem with all of them, though; I only get the humor when I watch these series in English. If I try watching them in Japanese, I don't laugh as much, especially in Soul Eater and Sgt. Frog's case, the superior English dub being the former's case, and the Americanized (yet good) re-writes of the latter.
There is no English dub of Gintama. And the subtitles aren't gag titles either. And yet, it is now among the funniest anime I have seen!
Wait, to be hilarious even without being in my native tongue, could Gintama be . . . the funniest anime ever!? Well, I'm ten episodes in so far, and so far, this is a lot funnier than most other animes branded as comedy.
And this was originally a manga from Shonen Jump! I haven't seen a good Jump series since Death Note! I won't summarize what Gintama is about, since you could just look it up elsewhere, but I can rate things about it here.
Plot: Almost exactly like the Goemon games, but in anime format. The characters know they're in an anime, and even when it's serious, you don't know whether to laugh or not. It's kind of like a Warner Bros. cartoon like that. I like it!
Characters: Not one-dimensional. This is perhaps the Achilles' Heel of most comedy animes; characters that are archetypes rather than proper characters. Not here in Gintama, however. I was wondering why Gintoki ranks so high on the MAL character list. I especially like the Shinsegumi characters, but everyone's likable.
Music: Meh. Not annoying, but doesn't add much.
Artwork: Nothing spectacular, but some of the action scenes are well-animated.
Voice work: Good God, this is like the Japanese equivalent of a Bang Zoom dub! Tomokazu Sugita! Rie Kugimiya! Daisuke Sagaguchi! Akira Ishida! Kazuya Nakai! Fumihiko Tachiki! Satsuki Yukino! Maybe this is why I love it without an English dub; the Japanese voicework is so lively!
Humor: Lots, some of it really funny. The two-part pilot is especially hilarious. They're dialog gags, visual gags, absurd situations, pop culture references, (including one to the 4Kids version of One Piece; Sunrise knew about that!?) . . . lots of different kinds of jokes, and most of them work!
Overall: All those Chicken Littles acting like anime is in its death throes obviously haven't seen Gintama yet. It's great!
