Hikigeki?! (Comedy/Anime RP)

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twinkletide

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Hikigeki?!

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A comedy RP for insane people.
Plot: Club Hikigeki. A tragically named club with nonetheless auspicious prospects. The Mecca of Japanese stand-up, with a regular roster of multiple critically-acclaimed comedians, some more than others. Drinks reasonably priced and reasonably tasty, peanuts cheap, condoms frankly overstocked rather creepily, despite not having rooms available. Come on in, have a laugh.

The only problem is that every single one of said comedians has a crush on one of the others, creating a love triangle that’s more like a love dodecahedron. As a result, as the patrons note, the club’s acts have as of late gotten more frenetic, the backstage banter louder and more acerbic; the stage is now filled with interruptions and digressions and hilarious yet somewhat uncomfortable improv and suspicious amounts of slapstick. And that’s only the beginning of their problems, as they’re faced by their toughest competitor yet: the lazily named Club Warai, a few blocks away, hailed by the Japan Times as the ‘cutting edge of Japanese alt-comedy...the avant-garde of oriental laughter.’ What will become of them if they can’t work together? If comedy is tragedy plus time, then prepare to die laughing, as they learn that the line between the comedy stage and life is much thinner than they thought!

Laconic: A bunch of comedians with crushes on each other cannot get along. Everything ensues.

Genre: Comedy/Drama/Absurdism/Sitcom?/Anime

Hello, person who clicked on this! This is, well, my skeleton of an RP: an absurd comedy RP with some nonetheless serious elements. Don't worry, it won't all be yuks; there will hopefully be a little bit of everything. But hopefully you will also laugh. A lot.

The goal for this is to create an atmosphere conducive to comedy by essentially letting people go ham, creating gags and plot points and scenes as they go along and entirely throwing out the realism rulebook. I have some plans for how I'll encourage this, but we'll see first if people are interested.

The point of reference I'm using for the ideal tone is somewhere between an anime like Nichijou and a more western-style stand-up comedy/slapstick sort of humor, where things are evidently outrageous and absurd but is not without genuine moments. So nothing like hardcore satire, but more like a character study that happens to also be hilarious.

Ideal number of RPers will be 6-8—any more than that and things might begin to seem cramped. But we'll see though.

Anyways, anyone interested? It's still somewhat skeletal, but things will fill out as time goes on.

Thank you for your time!

*The only part of the above art that looks good—the anime girl—is also not mine. Credit goes to Hitoribocchi no OO Seikatsu.
 
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-Expressing interest-
 
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Now that at least one person is interested, I would like to present

THE HISTORY OF CLUB HIKIGEKI (悲喜劇)
(reproduced from www.hikigeki.jp/eng; Last updated December 6, 2017)

1968 was famously, as The Japan Times recently put it, "The Year Japan Truly Raised Its Voice". Student protests pounded the nation, finding its greatest expression in the lurid and violent riots against the USS Enterprise. In the Western world the counterculture was still underway, and the spirit of left-wing anarchic energy seemed to spread all the way to the East, the general tone explosive. Oe Kenzaburo, now a hero among the Japanese left-wing, emerged around this time with some of his most excoriating work.

Aoi Murakami could feel it in the air. He was twenty-five that year, a graduate in Political Studies who had previously been a part of radical groups. But then, out of college, he was looking for something else, some way to express his anger and inspire a revolution. But how? He wasn't a good writer, having cheated his way through his senior thesis with the help of friends, he abhorred the idea of being a journalist, and, as radical as he was, he was quite cowardly and not given to participation in the really large-scale protests (during the aforementioned riots he stayed home, vaguely citing 'stomach problems' when probed for an explanation). So how could this man, this ineloquent, angry man, possibly express himself in a satisfactory manner?

The answer, as it turned out, lay in comedy. It wasn't quite so obvious at first; he disliked rakugo and other traditional Japanese comedic styles, calling them, in an obscure leftist zine, "the mirthful scorn of the bourgeoisie." However, one night, he had what he called a "religious experience" upon listening to a man complain about a cloud in the marketplace. He began to devise a new type of comedy, one that had never, ever been done ever before—one where a performer would stand on stage and declaim stream-of-consciousness rants to his listeners.

Sarcasm aside, it may very well have been a new type of comedy, as we'll see later. Before, though, there was the matter of finding the perfect venue, which came to him when his mother and father died from advanced age, leaving for their only son their restaurant, along with a rather sizable sum of money, wishing, in their will, "for our beloved son...to carry on the tradition, to continue to feed the men and women of Tokyo." Delighted at his good fortune, Aoi set immediately to work, renovating the restaurant with the help of his funds and delightedly planning sets to perform. The now-familiar structure of the venue was there from the very start: the austere wooden stage, meant to be a facsimile of the traditional rakugo stage, complete with a small, plush pillow in the center; the two bars, one on the first floor, which also served as a diner (though nobody ever dines there), one in the back of the second floor to allow people to get drinks while watching acts; the bar-like seats, the wooden stools, everything simultaneously jarring and out-of-place yet comforting in its own idiosyncratic way, suggesting a whole mythos behind every choice. More paintings and plaques have since come to adorn the walls, but the basics never changed.


The venue was finished in 1969, sired with the name "Club Hikigeki", after what he felt was the state of modern life ("a tragicomedy"). Before long he planned his very first act, along with two friends, with him being the headliner. On its official opening day in October 24, 1969, the club was strangely packed. Some were there out of respect for their former colleague. Some were there to hear him speak for the left-wing cause. Most were there just out of morbid curiosity, such as Yukio Mishima, who was a former patron of Aoi's parents' restaurant and wondered what their son was doing with it. On 11 P.M., a full hour after the scheduled time, Aoi burst onto stage and began to speak.

So much has been said about the ensuing chaos that it seems hardly necessary to speak any more. Suffice it to say it was a disaster. People burst out of the doors as if a fire had been set inside. The police were notified. The patrons were said to be in such distress that many had to be kept for several days in a mental health hospital. It has recently been speculated that Yukio Mishima's infamous suicide in 1970 was, in fact, caused by distress from the performance.

Aoi was arrested and placed in prison for 20 years. After his release he went on to become a journalist for the Japan Times, and refuses to speak about his past, and, reportedly, wishes to change his name and retire to the Bahamas.

Anyhow, Aoi does not figure much into the narrative from this point forward. Hikigeki was left abandoned for much of the next twenty years, treated by its residents almost like a haunted house (to this day, some elderly residents take convoluted routes through the city just to avoid the place). It fell not into disrepair, except from the general erosion of time; it more stood in eerie silence, warning people subliminally not to come close. By the onset of the nineties the city was in talks to destroy the club with great force and violence, to wipe the slate clean.

Luckily for comedy, however, the true patron saint of Japanese comedy, Manabu Okada, saved the day. You see, he saw the potential in the club. A historically significant venue, one who effectively demonized West-style stand-up in Japan—what better place to stage his plan to raise a new generation of stand-up comedians, to institute a revival, one that would combine the stylings of Western and Japanese comedy? to keep comedy, as he said, "in line with modernity?"

He purchased the land and set to work renovating, planning, thinking, recruiting. It was tough labor. The house was still, after all, a haunt, and its name followed him around everywhere. But people were more conducive now to the idea. It HAD been twenty years, after all, and Western stand-up had seen some big names pop up who bled into the East. So after a year of hard work, finally, the Club was open for business, and this time it seemed there to stay.

Business was, initially, tough. Comedians were paid on miniscule stipends. Manabu's ribs were visible on his naked sides. For a long time they had only one drink, vaguely called "beer", which in fact did not resemble beer much at all except in being alcoholic. But the quality of their acts, along with Manabu's strict work ethic, eventually made Club Hikigeki a veritable Mecca for Japanese stand-up comedians, the comedy equivalent of CBGB, the place of pilgrimage for anybody who liked to laugh.

Time went on. Today, though Manabu died five years ago in 2012, the Club sees itself packed constantly at least once a month, especially during the holiday season, when big names come out and hit for the fences, rocking the wooden walls with an uproar so loud it'd cause cars to honk back. Still, we at Club Hikigeki are dedicated to bringing you the latest and greatest in comedy.

Of course, we have our daily acts too, but hardly anyone comes to those. When the big dogs come barking the club really lights up, and you see where we've gotten our reputation as "the Best Comedy Club in Japan..."
 
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-Expressing interest as well-
 
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I have interest as well.
 
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Glad we're getting some more people on board! I figured since that is so, it would be good to be more specific about the type of comedy this RP and its structure will hopefully encourage. I present to you

A VERY BRIEF OUTLINE OF THE PLANNED COMEDIC STRUCTURE OF HIKIGEKI?! (WHICH MAY OR NOT BE AN OXYMORONIC PHRASE ['Planned Comedic Structure?' Really?])
I've recently been watching a Japanese comedy show called Documental, in which a bunch of Japanese comedians bet a million yen each, are locked in a room together, and then have six hours to do anything necessary to make the others laugh. In that show the comedy came not only from individual gags, but also from how everything piled up and how the comedians played off of each other. One person would pull off a gag and another comedian would use that as a set up for their own gag, and so on and so on; and to do this they had basically everything in the room at their disposal, along with their own individual styles and props. The result was a style of comedy that was extremely syncretic, and—as a result—extremely funny (really, if you have Amazon Prime, go watch it; it's amazing).

That sort of thing is what this RP keeps in mind with its setup. Along with giving each character a reason to go after each other, with the love, er, many-sided-shape, it actively encourages those kinds of syncretic gags as a way of getting each player back. And it also allows for more heart than Documental, because unlike that, which was a game show at heart, here there are actual characters with actual motivations. Also this is writing and not real life, so...you're pretty much free to go ham. In fact it'll pretty much be encouraged. It breaks the whole point of comedy to restrain the comedians, which is the point of the above joke concerning 'planned comedic structure'. We need some lines, obviously, but they'll be well outside the lines of what would be reasonable in more structured RPs.

Again; this is, at heart, a comedy RP, which means the comedy should be much more at the forefront than usual, and I do have some (rough) mechanics planned to encourage things (though at this point it's really iffy; we'll see). It's not gonna be the whole point, obviously. For one it won't all be funny for everyone, because everyone has a different sense of humor, and ultimately laughs aren't going to sustain a whole RP for any long period of time. But nonetheless hopefully you guys will still get many laughs out of this, or at least giggles, or at least smiles.

Anyways, this is a bit more vague than I'd hoped, and made it sound really game-y (which is a bad bad thing), and much of it just repeats the OP, but hopefully it at least gives you some small idea about this. And I'm open to suggestions and such, if you guys are willing! I'm just glad to have any interest at all, seeing how un-fleshed-out this idea was.
 
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I may wish to ask more whan I am sober.
 
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sounds interesting but i am the least funny person I know
 
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sounds interesting but i am the least funny person I know
Hey, that's no problem! Funniness is subjective anyhow - as Hitoshi Matsumoto said to open the show mentioned above, "the least funny person in the world is probably the funniest person in the world."
 
sounds interesting but i am the least funny person I know
Hey, that's no problem! Funniness is subjective anyhow - as Hitoshi Matsumoto said to open the show mentioned above, "the least funny person in the world is probably the funniest person in the world."
I'll start thinking up a fun character then
 
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You got my interest :D
 
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Right folks! Signup thread is coming...soon!

If you're wondering what happened to the aforementioned plans about mechanics and stuff, after some thought I found that most of them were sort of unnecessary. One small vestige will carry over however, which will be detailed when the signups go up and is frankly nothing major. Thank you!