Nichijou - Episode 11

It's Nichijou time again, and whaddya know, this week's instalment is book-ended by Yuuko finding herself in a tricky situation as she recovers from a cold and a few days off school just in time to take some tests she knows nothing about.

Of course, there's only one thing for it in this kind of situation - write some poems... wait, no, I mean try to bring back your receding cold by immersing yourself in icy water and sleeping with the air con turned down.  As none of this works, Yuuko's final attempt at getting the day off is perhaps the episode's best gag, as she tries to use a match against the thermometer to feign a high temperature, with obvious results.  Come test day, things aren't much better, mostly courtesy of her teacher's bizarre illustrations.

Away from Yuuko, we get a taste of the wealth of the school soccer club's president, follow a grandfather who is having a decidedly tough time, and of course we drop in on the Professor and Sakamoto as the former decides it would be fun to make some super glue ("It's huge." "Because it's super.") - the rest of that sketch writes itself, making possibly the best pay-off its oozing (almost literally) into the next scene featuring these characters.

Once again, this is a hit and miss episode of Nichijou, featuring some pretty long periods that struggled to find any particularly rich veins of humour, punctuated by a few genuinely good laughs that felt entirely more organic in their creation and delivery from the efforts around them.  As per usual, this really comes down to the series simply trying too hard to be wacky, whether it's via those huge over-reactions or its overall sense of randomness - still, the few laughs this instalment did grant me at least felt like some kind of pay-off for watching.