Seitokai Yakuindomo - Episode 2 (Dropped)

Seitokai Yakuindomo just about managed to redeem itself with its opening episode thanks to a mildly amusing sketch towards the end of that instalment - Does ending on a high note last time around mean that this improvement will continue into episode two?


The fact that this episode manages to squeeze in an early sanitary towel joke within two minutes suggests that no, it won't, and to be honest it only gets worse from that point forth. A member of the school asking the student council about creating a judo club ends up becoming a string of sex-related jokes, talk of studying for exams turns into a sex-related joke, receiving the results of those exams turns into a sex-related joke, comparing boxed lunches turns into a sex-related joke, even suffering from dry eyes turns into a sex-related joke. Can you see a pattern emerging here?

Unless moving on briefly to a joke about underwear counts differently, this second instalment of Seitokai Yakuindomo has proved absolutely what I suspected from the first - That this series is a one-trick pony. Much like I panned Mitsudomoe for beating its toilet humour and gross-out gags to death, so this series suffers the exact same fate by thinking that just mentioning sex a lot is funny. When suggestive humour is done subtly, or even via ridiculous wordplay Carry On... style it can be genuinely funny, but what we have here succeeds in neither. Instead what we get is a bunch of non-existence jokes that somehow become jokes by mentioning sex or vaginas or whatever at some point - This quickly becomes eye-rollingly tedious, and no number of decent voice actresses can save the whole thing from becoming incredibly boring. The thought of an anime season without any decent comedy leaves me in despair, but with Seitokai Yakuindomo hitting my list of dropped shows just as fast as Mitsudomoe did, that appears to be exactly what I'm left with.

Seitokai Yakuindomo - Episode 1

It's the first day of high school for Takatoshi Tsuda - A day which is always likely to be filled with new experiences, and nowhere more so than his preferred choice of school; Ousai Academy, once a girls only school, is now a mixed-gender school for the first time in its history.

Before he knows it, Tsuda has been press-ganged into taking a place as the vice president of the student council, to give it at least a little male balance in the midst of its three female members - The slightly oddball president Shino Amakusa, the short and rather young-looking accountant Suzu Hagimura, and the outwardly nice but also rather eccentric secretary Aria Shikijyou. Yes, I know this is sounding a lot like Seitokai no Ichizon, but it's bound to be funnier than that series, right? Right?!


Wrong. If I'm quite honest, most of the brief skits which make up this episode are entirely and absolutely unfunny - Perhaps I'm just too much of a modern man or something, but I'm neither shocked nor incredibly amused by hearing girls talking about tampons, periods or masturbation, and randomly throwing them in as punchlines to almost non-existent gags isn't going to change that. Perhaps luckily for this episode, it does manage to save itself a little with its final scene which sees the student council get interviewed, which is genuinely funny both in delivery and premise thanks to Shino and Aria's decision that their interview practice should be based upon the interviews given by porn actresses at the beginning of DVDs (complete with some hilarious examples).

If Seitokai Yakuindomo could keep up that kind of quality a little more, then it could hold a chance of being more than a reasonably well animated but ultimately boring attempt at comedy, but sadly I'm expecting more of the pointless "girls talking about sex and girly stuff when there are boys around is so funny" humour and less of the sharp wit and observation delivered towards the end of this instalment. Between this and the aforementioned Seitokai no Ichizon, I'm starting to suspect that the student councils at Japanese schools are filled with incredibly unfunny people.