Episode 4 – GINTAMA – Mr. Ginpachi’s Zany Class

My biggest hope for this show is that it finds better ways to utilize its premise rather than just relying on meta humor. To its credit, this episode does address this issue by spoofing one of the go-to plot points for any Japanese school scene: the Seven Wonders of School. How useful it is Gintama Often a rehash of other stories, this seems like it should be a slam dunk in the comedy department, but in execution, this might be the show’s least funny episode to date.

The basic setup here is very simple. Mr. Ginpachi, Mr. Shinpachi, and Mr. Kagura easily forget things at school and try to sneak into the school at night to retrieve them. What stands in their way are the Seven Wonders Gintama high school, but when they’re actually faced with these bone-chilling horrors, they become more mundane, and by mundane, I mean the wacky gimmicks of either Gintama Characters they happen to meet. The blood-curdling cries coming from the staff room turn out to be Zenzo applying hemorrhoid ointment, while the strange rattling sounds coming from one of the classrooms at night turn out to be Kondo burying his face in Ota’s chair like he’s a stalker. That’s…more or less the whole joke, and these are the two most elaborate uses of it in the entire episode. The rest are really just quick flashes of our main trio’s strange reactions to other characters, and none of them are particularly interesting. No gags are lazier than simply pointing at an oddball and expecting a laugh without any build-up, and seeing the cast further reduced to their personality quirks really makes it feel like the animation staff didn’t know what else to do with them in the context of a spinoff.

Ironically, the parts of this episode that made me laugh the most were the parts that made the least effort to be funny. As the main trio attempt to track down the last of the Seven Wonders, they instead encounter a boy who, under intense pressure from failing an exam, attempts to jump from a rooftop. While they tried their best to talk him out of it, they were also quick to point out how cliche it was for a school setting, and that the mix of comedy and drama was the closest the show got to an actual feel. Gintama. I related to the way Mr. Ginpachi managed to convince the kid to stay alive by pointing out that he would love all the new JUMP stories if he tried to keep living. While this may seem a bit silly on paper, sometimes having good media to look forward to can be a really useful motivator when you’re having a bad time and need a good escape, so it’s nice to see it being seen as valuable.

Sadly, even that moment of sincerity doesn’t change how simplistic the conflict here is. I loved one of Ginpachi-san’s earlier jokes where he tried to use reverse psychology to convince a kid not to jump, just to make him more willing to do so. I wouldn’t call it great compared to Gintamathe usual standards. Even the final punchline, in which the kid is actually a ghost, feels a little too predictable, and while it’s not inherently unfunny, it doesn’t feel particularly inspiring either. It feels weird to be so harsh on everything Gintama Related Media Speaking of Comedy, But Even the Weakest Gintama Episodes usually have some genuine jokes, but there was nothing here that really interested me. I really hope this is just an exception to a weak episode and not indicative of the rest of this spin-off, but it makes me feel less optimistic about the future of this show

grade:

Gintama – Mr. Ginpachi’s funny classroom Currently live broadcast
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