I'm caught in a bit of a bind with Seitokai Yakuindomo. I have always stood by the principle that a show with only one joke, no matter how funny the joke may be, wears out its welcome fast, and Seitokai Yakuindomo is indeed exactly one joke: a sex joke. The staff lifted a four-koma manga with short punchy dirty jokes and dropped it right into anime form, complete with title cards every minute or so to announce the start of the next bit. It is rare to see such a direct translation from a four-koma style, but even rarer to see a show that truly and honestly forgoes any plot, character development, or even basic slice of life antics in order to fully embrace its calling as one long innuendo. And it should be rare, because by all rights that shouldn’t be entertaining. But entertaining it is; maybe it’s the teenager inside me who still giggles at a good dick joke, but thirteen episodes of enjoyment is where my internal immaturity ends and the show’s accomplishments begin.
Maybe it works so well in part because it completely inverts our expectations from the outset. Ousai High School, with a flowery name to reflect its traditional status as an all-girls high school, has finally opened its doors to men for the first time, and in turn has opened the doors for its first wave of lucky male acceptees to fully embrace the harem life they could only dream of while watching anime in their basement all through middle school. Tsuda is not one of them; he only chose the school because it was close to his house, and is overly considerate of women by avoiding sexuality and contact of any sort. Yet within minutes of arriving on campus he is pressed into service as the Vice President of the Student Council with the authoritative president Amakusa, the elegant secretary Shichijou, and the pint-sized genius Suzu, bringing his perspective as a male to help the integration of males into the school, while also playing the straight man to the Student Council’s antics.
Think you know where this is going? Actually, the setup lends itself to fanservice, romantic subplots, Tsuda bringing out the best in the other Council members while keeping them firmly on track, and a lot of hidden shame about impure thoughts like kissing and holding hands, and yet we get none of these things. Amakusa and Shichijou unabashedly say the dirtiest and most foul sex jokes that could be put on TV, and yet they are hyper competent and only rely on Tsuda in his professional position as vice president. In contrast to the constant stream of jokes about breasts, penises, periods, vaginas, ejaculation, anal play, and everything in between, we only see their unrevealing uniforms, never getting so much as a panty shot or cleavage (although we do see Tsuda with his fly open once). Tsuda isn’t searching for a harem, and so a harem never comes to find him. He may be the straight man, but in reality he is barely hanging on for dear life as the two top council members go to town with their delusions, with their faculty advisor, the president of the Newspaper Club, and Tsuda’s sister eventually joining in the dirty fun.
Between the curious and unabashed Amakusa, the absolutely shameless and elegantly foul Shichijou, the completely pure leader of the judo club Mitsuba, the intrepid lying journalist Hata, the delusion-ridden pubescent Kotomi, the genuinely promiscuous Ms. Yokoshima, and a whole host of other crazy archetypes, any combination of characters yields a bizarre back-and-forth of sexual deviancy with different flavors and levels of extremity. The oddball out is Suzu, who is solely the subject of height jokes and being mistaken for a child. In the midst of a whole host of dirty gags, to suddenly have a sign appear pointing below the camera saying “Suzu is somewhere around here” completely threw me for a loop. Of course she too occasionally gets worked into the narrative of sex jokes, but she also plays a second straight man alongside Tsuda, which offers some relief from the otherwise single-minded focus of his tsukkomi’s. She too is a worthy addition to the memorable and completely off-the-walls cast.
While I said the show avoids all the classic slice-of-life jokes, it actually goes through the motions of a beach episode, a hot springs episode, a sports festival, a culture festival, and more, but these comes off more as a natural part of their high school experience, or perhaps a tip-of-the-hat to the genre while simultaneously subverting them for the sake of more shameless nonsense. A good example is the beach episode, the only time we see the cast in any outfit that could be considered revealing. Tsuda imagines a scenario where a wave comes and washes away Shichijou’s bra, with her playfully exclaiming “what a big wave!” He dismisses it as the kind of thing that only happens in anime. A moment later we hear a wave crash, and turn around to see Shichijou in exactly the position he imagined, but with her swimsuit still on. She playfully exclaims “what a big wave! It even got in my vagina!”, and suddenly the moment is lost.
If normal slice of life is an idolized teenage boy’s distant fantasy, then Seitokai Yakuindomo manifests the sorts of terrible puns and obsession with sex that actual teenagers experience with their friends; no panty shots or unexpected romantic developments, but plenty of erection jokes. Every joke follows a similar trajectory and most can be seen from a mile away, and depending on your tolerance for sex jokes you may consider spacing out the episodes over a longer period of time to refresh, although despite my expectations I felt no need to do so. Even if the jokes are predictable, part of the fun is imagining being in the high school when it all happens. We see the joke coming and think it privately, giggling to ourselves before moving on. Then the people around us who are supposed to be dignified actually come out and say it, and all we can do is laugh out of sheer embarrassment and disbelief. Did they actually just say that? Did they actually just say that? Did they actually just say that?