Daily Lives of High School Boys - Episode 3

It's summertime!  Okay, well, it's not actually summertime, as this week's Daily Lives of High School Boys self-referentially points out, but let's just say it is for the sake of this episode, okay?

Of course, summer can only mean one thing for a high school boy - chasing after girls on the beach!  Of course, this is easier said than done, as Hidenori realised when he comes to the shocking revelation that guys are, in the eyes of girls, pretty much exactly the same as noodles.  Still, you can't win them all, so it's off to the hot spring ("so much steam") and a game of trivia ping-pong that leaves Tadakuni feeling inadequate in both knowledge and ability with a little ball.

After having a crack at creating the world's worst anime related radio show (and succeeding, I would say), a rather pointless time-filling (and CD selling) montage leads into Hidenori finding himself anguishing over whether he should talk to a girl who takes the same train as him.  Could it be love?  Or maybe it's just the hair growing out of the mole on her neck that compels him to speak to her.  All of this leads us into the big finale, a dig at the high school girl anime genre complete with Yuu Kobayashi screaming her heart out for much of its running time.

Whether it features high school girls or boys, quick-fire anime comedy tends to be a hit and miss affair as I've discussed many times previously, but at least Daily Lives of High School Boys is managing to keep up a decent hit rate - the boys amazement at the amount of steam in their bath was a hilarious dig at modern anime censorship, while the ping pong game which followed was laugh out loud funny in a more general sense.  This show is at its best when it's poking fun either at itself or other anime clichés and tropes, but it also has a vein of more traditional humour running through it - although it doesn't always get it right, it continues to be entertaining stuff more often than not.