Thus, many of the initial sketches this week are either punctuated by physical violence or entirely reliant upon it, whether it's the shame or your family finding your porn collection (we've all been there), Hidenori's attempt to draw manga that better reflects the life of the average teenage male, or indeed the aforementioned youngster's attempt to live out a manga cliché for himself.
Thankfully, things very much take an upward swing from here via some wonderful observational humour, such as the difficulties of being short-changed at a cash register against ruining the hapless employee's day, or even his career maybe. Then there's that awkward moment when you have to extract something that's stuck in a tree, which eventually boils down to throwing even more things at it and hoping that they don't also become lodged in its branches. The rest of the episode sees a birthday treat go decidedly awry, the horrors of an accurate horoscope and the trouble with insects, before our high school girls round things off by being overly competitive and getting entirely the wrong idea when it comes to shortening skirts.
Overall, this week's Daily Lives of High School Boys was a bit of a mixed bag - an improvement over last week's episode with at least a couple of genuinely good sketches to make up for some of its weaker content. Again, those weaknesses tend to come from repetition above all else - I'd be the first to admit that teenage boys are always over-reliant on physicality in terms of both self-expression and comedy, but such slapstick is only funny so many times when... well, when you're a grown-up basically. Despite such qualms however, the series remains worth watching for those moments where it breaks out into some great observational comedy, which is more than enough to keep things ticking over.
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