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Anime is a storytelling medium that has the luxury of taking big swings not just with its ideas and characters, but also its tone and sense of humor. There is no shortage of comedy anime that exhibit restraint and exist in a relatively grounded reality, but it can truly be special when an anime doesn’t hold back and unleashes relentless gags and offers a ludicrous base level of nonsense for its universe.
This approach isn’t always easy to maintain, but it’s helped certain anime build a reputation for their weird and wacky impulses that can turn the simplest setup into an unbelievable punchline. Some of these outlandish anime comedies have become celebrated classics, like Gintama, Excel Saga, and Pop Team Epic, but there are even more bizarre anime that fly under the radar and remain relatively obscure.
Inferno Cop Tells A Ridiculous Story In A Laughably Low-Quality Manner
It's hard to believe that Studio TRIGGER is responsible for Inferno Cop, an anime that looks like a completely embarrassing joke. However, that's the point. The ludicrously fast-paced comedy follows a vigilante hero with a flaming skull head who seeks to get revenge on the corrupt organization that killed his family.
Inferno Cop doesn't even attempt to follow any kind of logic as it celebrates time travel, godhood, killer babies, and so much more. The series' storytelling is out-of-control, but its presentation style pushes this lunacy to even greater heights.
Puni Puni Poemy Is A Delirious Deconstruction & Parody Of Magical Girl Anime
Excel Saga is an ultra-heightened parody series where nothing is sacred, and it actively advertises itself as "Quack Experimental Anime" in its title. Puni Puni Poemy, Excel Saga's spin-off, unsurprisingly pushes these parody impulses even further in a relentless assault of absurdity.
Puni Puni Poemy is a chaotic parody of the magical girl genre and anime's growing "fan service" trend. It follows Poemi, an enthusiastic ten-year-old who becomes a powerful magical girl superhero, Puni Puni Poemy, after she skins a magical talking fish.
Poemi uses her new powers to take on otherworldly threats in a cavalcade of gags where nothing is taken seriously and the fourth-wall is constantly being destroyed. Puni Puni Poemy is only two episodes long, but it crams in enough gags and nonsense to fill a full 12-episode series.
Punch Line Puts The Fate Of The World On An Excitable Spirit’s Hormones
Punch Line is easily one of MAPPA's weirdest series, and a title that needs to be respected for just how "out there" it gets with its ideas. High school student Yuta Iridatsu experiences a traumatic event that separates his spirit from his body, and the only way to rectify this problem is through the retrieval of a holy relic.
If all this wasn't enough, Yuta suffers from a rare psychological condition in which his "soul frequency" will overload if he becomes too excited by seeing girls' underwear. If such a thing happens, a meteor will crash into the Earth and wipe out all of humanity.
It's hard to take Yuta's situation seriously, but Punch Line also successfully subverts all this silliness by building to intricate storytelling that's driven by unbelievable plot twists that include time travel and a terrorist cult. Punch Line achieves an impressively interwoven narrative that rises above its abject wackiness.
The Ping-Pong Club Unites Outrageous Outcasts With Unscrupulous Schemes
Not to be confused with Masaaki Yuasa's groundbreaking Ping Pong The Animation, 1995's The Ping-Pong Club is absolute nonsense that revolves around the daily exploits of the awkward, irreverent members of a middle school ping pong club. Maeno, Izawa, and the rest of the club are less interested in perfecting their table tennis skills than they are in making waves with the opposite sex and engaging in lewd pranks.
The Ping-Pong Club is certainly rooted in a '90s sense of humor, but it's a title that's aged surprisingly well, despite its uncomfortable energy. Each episode, which is broken into two separate stories, is a trainwreck waiting to happen, yet one that audiences won't be able to stop watching.
Bobobo-Bo Bo-Bobo Is An Extremely Silly Satire Of Action & Shonen Series
Shonen satires aren't anything revolutionary, but it's rare to see an anime tap into such unrestrained madness as Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo. Even the anime's name doesn't take itself seriously. Set in the nebulous future in a world that's forced humanity to shave their heads and embrace baldness, Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo fights for follicular freedom with his legendary Super Fist of the Nose Hair attack.
This ability allows Bobobo to use his nose hairs as weapons, and that's honestly the least weird thing about this anime. Bobobo aligns himself with increasingly unusual allies that include immortal sentient jelly, a sun-shaped miscreant, and a female torpedo.
Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo embraces a fighting style known as Hajike, which determines its winner by whoever is the most ridiculous and illogical. It's a miracle that this anime actually aired on Toonami, with an equally outrageous English dub.
KamiKatsu Examines Life, Death & Religion In A Godless Dystopia
KamiKatsu: Working for God in a Godless World is a fascinating deconstruction of religion, faith, and mob mentality that's presented in an incredibly unconventional manner. Yukito is the son of the leader of an eccentric cult who endlessly praises a goddess prophet named Mitama.
Yukito's parents accidentally kill him during a ritual that goes wrong, which leads to him being reborn in an alternate world in which there's no concept of gods, religion, and humanity doesn't fear the idea of death. This freeing dream world quickly becomes a nightmare when Yukito realizes that a dystopian government determines when its citizens live and die, which is largely determined by their usefulness to society.
Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan Finds Endlessly Humor In A Chaotic Angel Assassin
Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan is a four-episode OVA from the 2000s that remains largely overlooked, partially because of its utterly wild premise. Sakura is a 14-year-old boy who creates an anti-aging formula for women that's exploited to become an immortality elixir. This brash act of defiance offends God, who sends an angel assassin from the future — Dokuro — to execute Sakura.
However, Dokuro believes that she can redeem Sakura and distract him enough that he never creates this anti-aging technology. Even so, every episode involves Dokuro brutally killing Sakura with her spiked club, "Excaliborg," but then proceeding to immediately resurrect him. Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan turns Sakura's many violent deaths into punchlines and only gets more ridiculous from there.
Issoshi Sleeping: Sleeping With Hinako Becomes A Virtual Slumber Party
Part of what makes anime so appealing is that it's able to explore more experimental ideas that may not necessarily fit in a full series or feature film. OVAs are great opportunities to engage in more limited concepts that aren't afraid to take risks, while not having to worry about ratings. Isshoni Sleeping: Sleeping with Hinako is a 40-minute OVA that essentially functions as a sleepover with its titular character.
Hinako has appeared in several instructional OVAs that break down activities like exercise. Sleeping with Hinako breaks down various nighttime habits as Hinako prepares for bed, while the audience is expected to do the same. Sleeping with Hinako isn't especially popular, and it keys into a very niche audience, but it's still a wacky experiment that takes advantage of the OVA format.
Samurai Pizza Cats Is A Bewildering Love Letter To Sentai Action Series
Samurai Pizza Cats, also known as Legendary Ninja Cats and Cat-Party Ninja Legend What the Heck?, became a surprising cult classic during the '90s with a playful English dub that attempted to take advantage of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles craze. The fourth-wall breaking gag anime functions like a broad parody of the many sentai and tokusatsu series, primarily Power Rangers and Kamen Rider.
Set in the retro-futuristic Little Tokyo, three robotic cats split their time working in a pizzeria and fighting crime. Samurai Pizza Cats’ heroes are also consciously aware that they're the stars of a TV show and performing for an audience, which only heightens the hilarity. Characters have names like Speedy Cerviche, Guido Anchovy, and Polly Esther, while the villainous Big Cheese explodes whenever he gets too angry.
Sarazanmai Uses Surreal Ideas & Transformations To Explore Growing Pains
There's a lot to unpack in Sarazanmai, a surreal and surprisingly sweet coming-of-age comedy that involves three friends who are cursed with becoming kappas after they break a sacred statue and anger the Kappa Prince. This premise, while weird, could still manage to function as a fairly normal anime. However, Sarazanmai merely uses this as an introduction to even wackier exploits.
These kappa boys can only become human again if they extract a mythical organ known as "shrikodama" from zombies. In order to retrieve these shirikodama, the kappa boys must perform a synchronized dance that concludes with the organ being extracted from the zombies' buttocks. Sarazanmai uses all of these surreal and experimental ideas as a way to break down the struggles of adolescence, building confidence, and forging connections.
