Japanese comedian

“What about your career in showbiz?” – Working as a low level entertainer during COVID-19 in Japan

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It’s day two of my new “write more crap!” mindset and, I’ve gotta tell ya, I’ve run out of things to tell ya.

In case you’re just emerging from a long medically-induced coma or living in the COVID-free paradise of New Zealand, the world has been in the grips of a raging pandemic over the last year, which isn’t really conducive to a lifestyle full of things for a random dude to write about on his site that no one reads.

Sure, Japan has thankfully avoided the full brunt of the pandemic but I’ve tried to my part to stay inside, wear a mask, and interact with as few people as possible. (In my defense, this was pretty much my strategy pre-pandemic as well.) The furthest I’ve traveled in the past year is probably my aforementioned long-ass trip to the Chiba countryside for a TV thing and even that was only an hour away by freeway. My travels within Tokyo itself have been just as limited, which is to say I can pretty much count the number of times I have rode the train in the last year on my fingers alone.

Really one of the best parts of this entire situation (if pandemics can even have good parts) has been the long walks I get to take on the abandoned Tokyo streets at night. Sure, it’s night so you wouldn’t expect many people out and about anyways but in the before times, an uncrowded Tokyo street was still crowded by normal human being standards. Now though? Pure solitude. And now I can laugh at dumb podcasts while walking without having to worry about drunk old salarymen giving me the stinkeye.

“But what about your career in showbiz, Stephen?” you ask, sleepily feigning interest as you read this while taking a poop.

Ah, good question! Let me see…

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Things you learn during a hellish 18-hour Japanese TV shoot

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It has come to my attention that some people think my writing “doesn’t suck” or is even, as someone put it, “good”. You’d think I’d take that as a hint that I should write more often and consistently. (If I had an editor, they would probably tell me that often and consistently both sorta mean the same thing in this context and that a proper writer would never drop a ‘sorta’ into their work.) Hell, it’s almost been a year (the start of COVID-19!) since my last post (in which I promised to showcase some of those much ballywhoed Seventh Generation of Japanese Comedy members in my next post but then summarily never go around to it) and to tell you the truth, I don’t think I got enough riding juice in me to squirt out all over this keyboard on a consistent basis (is that how sex/writing metaphors work?).

But look out world! Stephen was on a hellishly long 18 hour shoot for a TV show segment that he’ll probably be cut out of and he’s got some things to say!

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So What the Hell IS Manzai Anyways?

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Don’t tell anyone now but this is apparently “real” manzai.

When we last left off, we were talking about the rise of a new batch of Japanese comedy stars, dubbed by the media as the Seventh Generation of Japanese Comedy, a term determined more by savvy marketers than by any actual generational shift in how comedy is crafted in Japan.

I had originally planned on introducing some of the “top” members of this “new” group in a new post but while writing it, I had a long and deep conversation with my podcast co-host and actual Japanese comedy researcher Nick about manzai and its various evolutionary shifts as a comedy form. More specifically, we spoke about the act of performing manzai in the era of remote lives and plastic shields aimed at preventing the spread of COVID-19. (Side note, it was a great and really deep conversation about the craft of being a manzai comedian that probably only five or six people in the entire world would probably enjoy hearing.)

A long long time ago, Yoshimoto attempted to introduce the world to manzai via a Netflix “documentary” that I still have crazy stress nightmares about being in. In it, we said that manzai was one mic, two people, and the “Japanese Dream” (Note: I really wasn’t lying about those stress nightmares.). But is that really true? In the four years since then and in the last several months, I’ve given this idea a lot of thought.

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The Comedy Landscape in 2020 Japan – The Seventh Owarai Generation and the Great Corona Pause

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The “New” Generation of Comedians appearing on Ametalk

As pretty much any returning reader to this blog knows, I am an “owarai geinin” in Japan. Why don’t I just call myself a comedian? Because the more and more time I spend in the Japanese entertainment industry, the more I’ve come to understand that comedians and geinin are two completely different categories of roles/people entirely.

With the novel coronavirus pretty much putting everything on hold everywhere in the world, now is the perfect time to take of stock of how the Japanese entertainment world has changed or shifted over the last couple of years.

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Stephen Starts a Diary: June 9th

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6/9 Saturday

So I broke my phone and a wall today.  There are no euphemisms involved in that statement.  Today, for a plethora of reasons, I threw my phone and made it so my screen didn’t work anymore and punched a hole in the wall of the dressing room of a theater before a show.

My obvious anger issues aside (and now is probably a better time than ever to emphasize that your mental health should be your absolute first priority as a human being), the fact that I had to waste most of my Saturday (a rare half-day off) sitting in a cramped Softbank store getting a new phone (my phone was three years old and my contract was up anyways)  was what probably ground my gears the most.  I know that I have no one to blame but myself for the entire ordeal but there is pretty much no good reason someone should have to sit around and wait for anything for two-and-a-half hours, let alone a phone sold just about anywhere on a contract 90% completed while waiting in line.

Of course, as with any other country in the world, the phone guy’s gonna try to upsell you, trying to get you to buy the biggest, most expensive thing possible.  I suppose, then, that the phone guy would consider himself lucky as I preceded to upsell myself to the 256 GB version of the iPhone X, the most expensive option available, with little prompting from him on the matter.  What can I say?  I’m an easy mark.

Of course, in the few hours since I’ve had the phone I’ve been suffereng from phantom home button syndrome, aimlessly pressing the flat portion of the screen where the home button used to be on the older less fancy models of Apple’s ubiquitous smartphone.  It’s enough to make a guy want to punch through another wall.

Stephen Starts a Diary: May 20th

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May 20th Sunday

So there’s a football “controversy” “rocking” Japan, in so much as a football controversy could ever rock a country that gives approximately no damns about football as a sport or concept.

Apparently, some defensive end for a college team here laid a cheap hit on the other team’s quarterback to start off a game, knocked him out of the game, and it somehow exploded into a huge controversy that all the news shows are covering the hell out of for some reason (probably because it’s a slow news week). Continue reading →

Stephen Starts a Diary: May 17th

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5/17  Thursday

When I first decided to become a comedian and went to my first owarai class, there were over 400 or so people there with me, all taking their first steps down the path of Japanese comedy at the same time as I was.  Time passed, people quit, and that number soon dwindled down: 300, 200, down to the one-hundred-something people that it is now.

Even among those hundred-something people, you have dozens of people who haven’t been active for months and are really just comedians in name only.  Since I’m, as the Japanese people like to say, tongatteru, most of my “friends” among my douki are in this category. Continue reading →

Stephen Starts a Diary: May 12th

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5/12 Saturday

“What do you do on your days off?”

It’s a question that people ask more often than not, blissfully unaware that as a brokeass young comedian, I have no days off. 

Today for example, was a “day off” where I had no official work but rather spent the day with my comedy partner working on stuff for our act at a local park.  The weather was great, the stuff we were coming up with was coming along well, I got beaned in the back of the head with some kid’s baseball.

I don’t know if it qualifies as work but I certainly don’t feel like I had a day off.

PS, even though it’s probably the city-est city in the world, Tokyo still has its charming places of greenery.

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