Japanese Stand-Up Comedians vs. Foreign Audiences (Video)

This television show takes audiences made up of certain types of people and has comedians face off against each other to see who can get a greater reaction from the audiences. Each audience member must hold a ping pong ball in his or her mouth, and the number of ping pong balls that fall out of the audience members’ mouths is used to measure how many of them couldn’t help but laugh at the comedy act. While it is common for the audiences to be something like Shibuya gyaru, elderly men, housewives, or high school girls, there are occasionally audiences made up entirely of foreigners. Here some clips of the two times I’ve seen foreign audiences on the show:

First off, here is Japanese comedy duo Obeka vs. Australian comedian Chad Mullane in a battle to make foreign elementary schoolers laugh:
Video 1: Obeka

Video 2: Chad Mullane

Obeka’s act, which depended entirely with putting on big rubber noses and blonde wigs and doing some dumb comedy in their bad English. While I personally find comedy acts in which Japanese comedians imitate the racial features of foreigners annoying, their act was the stupid kind of humor that little kids would find funny, so they managed to get a respectable number of ping pong balls. However, Chad’s impersonations of various celebrities managed to get a higher score in the end. Chad tells the hosts that he was kind of nervous performing in front of gaijin for the first time, but he thought he did pretty well.

Foreign elementary schoolers seemed to like the kind of acts that appear on this show, but what about old foreigners? Here we have two comedians facing off to see who can make an audience of older foreign residents of Japan laugh.

Clip 1: Tekken

Clip 2: Kenji Tamura

Both Tekken and Kenji Tamura bomb horribly with the audience. Tekken’s picture-based comedy act seemed to rely on a Japanese story few of them were familiar with, and Kenji Tamura’s act was just plain retarded. I’m guessing that the few ping pong balls they managed to get were intentionally spit at them by audience members who thought they sucked. The canned laughter in the background really liked their acts, though!