Contrary to popular belief, comedy is not a universal language with different cultures admiring some forms of comedy and rejecting others. The comedy of manga is no exception since it comes from a specific, historically isolated culture and the fact that a manga format requires a new method to time and deliver jokes.
Let’s start with Japanese comedy in general. Japanese comedy tends to be very heavily focused on both slapstick and puns. Slapstick, as you might imagine, is very visual and works well for the manga medium (although admittedly the set up is quite often dialogue heavy). In contrast, puns are extremely difficult to translate with your only choices typically being to explain the pun so that the audience understands it and drain all comedy from it or to create a new pun which works in the translated manga and retains the spirit of the original (also known as adaptive translation).
The timing of comedy is particularly important. 4-koma manga uses a paneling form called Kishōtenketsu to develop the gag and to then deliver the punchline. However, most manga use more complicated paneling. “So surely the mangaka can’t control the delivery of the joke then?” I hear you say. That is actually wrong as a mangaka can, in fact, control the speed at which you read the story through the use of different sizes of panels. A large panel slows the story down while a small panel speeds it up. Through this, a mangaka can, in fact, time a joke for when it is most effective.
There are also certain forms of gags that I can only recall coming across in manga. I often tell people of a gag from Dr Slump where a character is irritated by a bird flying high above them. In an effort to get rid of the bird, they shout and create a sound effect. The character then takes hold of the exclamation mark and uses it to beat the bird out of the sky. This, of course, is atypical of most manga humour, but it continues to stand out to me as one of the most inventive and unique jokes I have seen in a manga.
I can also recall a wonderful gag from the legendary Osamu Tezuka in his series “Swallowing the Earth”. In it, there is a scene where two characters are having a sword fight on a rocking boat. Tezuka cleverly draws the panels to represent the boat rocking back and forth as the characters clumsily slip and slide from one side of the boat to the other.
Of course, these represent highly atypical forms of comedy in manga and, yet, I would argue that these gags represent the unique comedy only available to manga. I, of course, have enjoyed many comedy manga over the years such as Azumanga Daioh and Ranma 1/2 that are a little more typical in their styles of Japanese comedy (i.e. making use of slapstick and puns) but I would love to see more manga take advantage of their medium in the same way that Akira Toriyama and Osamu Tezuka did.
I would love to hear what comedy manga you have enjoyed, what some of your favourite jokes or gags were from them and how you think comedy in manga is and can be unique.
Hopefully you have found this article interesting and informative and, if you wish to seek any of the works I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use amazon.co.uk and amazon.com for all of your needs!