Connor and Niamh can’t remember the name of a song that’s stuck in their heads, so they try to distract themselves by discussing episodes 1 through 13 of the first season of Sakigake!! Cromartie High School.

We start out with the first and really only bit of theory bullshit by talking about the yakuza and yankii genre convention of the giri-ninjo conflict and how it relates to the comedy of Cro High, which we then use to launch into how much Cro High actually operates as a genre parody vs. absurdism, Kamiyama as a protagonist, the process of adaptation from manga to anime, the character of Yamaguchi as the comedian who tries to metatextually analyze the comedy of the show in which he himself is a character, the all-encompassing scope of the comedy of the show, the show within a show that is Pootan, the way Cro High continues to develop expectations in order to subvert them, and more.

Niamh also has an (at this point no longer secret) announcement that faer comedy video art series Today’s Garfield Read Aloud has returned as a Twitter account, @GarfReadAloud.

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“The Yakuza Film: An Introduction” by Keiko Iwai McDonald, published in Reframing Japanese Cinema: Authorship, Genre, History

“On Ninkyo” by Sato Tadao, published in the journal Shisō no kagaku (Science of Thought)

Mention of Alcohol (After the outro when Niamh and Connor are joking around)

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