How Humor is Portrayed through Expressions in Anime/TV Series

I've been watching a lot of Anime and Wuxia, and I noticed that most Anime and Wuxia I love are ones filled with humor. Then, I started thinking. What makes these shows funny? Why do we find certain things funny? What exactly makes us laugh? I didn't really know the answer at first, so I decided to take a couple of scenes I thought were hilarious and deconstruct them, to find out exactly what I thought was funny. One of the things that distinctively stood out was expressions/voice.

I am aware there are many more ways to portray humor but this article will be just focusing on expressions and voice.

Humor through Expression and Voice



(Hilarious angry expression from One Piece)

One of the major ways to convey humor in both Anime and Wuxia is through expressions. In Anime, expressions may be an exaggerated face, or funny looking eyes and teeth that looks completely different from how they usually look. Their teeth may be huge and in zigzags and so on.

I think one of the main things that make us laugh is when something unexpected happens. That also applies to when someone says something unexpected. That also explains why we don't usually find something as funny (or we don't laugh as much) the second time. That's because we already know and was expecting it. Perhaps we find these expressions funny because we usually don't see them.

An equivalent of that in Wuxia would be when characters have funny voices, expressions on their faces and just act completely crazy or random. That can be perceived as really funny, especially if we're not used to a character acting this way. An example of that would be Jianchi in Xuan Yuan Sword. After his souls got removed, he turned into a crazy madman. Probably one of the funniest characters I've seen a long time, Jianchi's humor comes from his voice, facial expressions and madness.

Here's an example of that on an MV I made:



Sometimes, we may be expecting a character to say something, but the character says something completely the opposite (with a funny face), and if that manages to catch us off guard, we will probably find it very funny. Also, the other character's reaction can also play an important role in how funny the scene is. Sometimes, you can just tell naturally, that a reaction is funny. As you do when you tell a funny joke and you can tell how people felt with their reactions.

A great advantage of humor through expressions is that you don't need to have any prior knowledge, as jokes often reference something that requires knowledge beforehand. Watching funny expressions in Anime is like watching Mr Bean and laughing to his silliness - you don't even need to know English to get the humor. Although in Anime, you will need to know what they're saying, but at least you don't need to have knowledge about something beforehand to understand the joke.

Scene Analysis

I'm going to be analyzing a scene from Bleach, which you can watch here.

In the first scene, Ichigo was asking Urahara why didn't he tell the truth in a very serious tone. Then, Urahara unexpectedly said "exactly right", with "GUILTY happy" face! Then, Ichigo elbows him and says, "that just pisses me off". I thought the build up of comedy began with Urahara replied, then it got funnier when Ichigo reacted the way he did (with the angry face and saying it pisses me off in that tone).



Let's also look at the One Piece example. Sanji and Zoro are sleeping on the ground. They hear Nami calling them to wake up, and Sanji was being all flirty towards Zoro (asking for a kiss hahaha!), thinking it was Nami. Then the both of them wake up, and of course, Sanji was the first to call Zoro a bastard with a disgusting face that scared him half to death. Of course, Zoro returned that hilarious expression.

I'm a huge fan of funny expressions like that and I think what makes them so funny is that we weren't expecting them.