Here’s the question: when you see a crudely drawn penis, do you laugh or cringe? I tend to cringe. I thought the Saddam Hussein-Satan sex jokes in the South Park movie weren’t funny enough to overcome their bad taste. Here, in Ping Pong club, we have a player who mesmerizes opponents with his “Exposed Pecker” serve, wherein he leaps into the air and his un-circumcised wang comes a-shuffling out. I didn’t laugh.
I didn’t laugh at a lot of Ping Pong Club, a sort of “extreme” comedy anime about a group of social misfits in a ping pong club. Their nemesis is at teacher and coach of the girl’s team, who want they guy’s practice room. Obvious and dull conflict ensues.
Consider this: the boys want to get back their practice room, so they dress up the tall, blond member of the team as a pharaoh and send him after the girls. His b.o. is so strong, it knocks out all the girls in the room. As the boy’s team drags them out, they take the opportunity to undress and feel up some of the lasses as they move them. Do you think that’s funny?
Or, when the boys are caught plotting against the evil teacher, they cover it up by saying they were looking at a small worm. Which is one of the boy’s penis. He pulls it out and asks a passing female teacher if she’ll fellate him – she examines the “worm” but decides against it. Is this funny?
If the concepts seem kind of crude, the execution isn’t filled with exonerating finesse. There are very few jokes, and those that aren’t based on phalluses are no funnier than the ones that are. The style of the show doesn’t have a lot to offer it, either – the character designs are ugly. Very ugly. They look like an attempt to ape the American style-designs, but are too wedded to anime style, and thus look just like mediocre anime drawings. The animation is low-budget, the stories are dull, and the humor is flat.
I was not offended by the humor of Ping Pong Club. I was offended by the boredom is induced.
Rating: D
