Osaka Comedy Festival is a relatively new annual event, created to promote “comedy as a shared language” through non-verbal (physical) comedy and other types of performance art.
Funny Women was offered media access to this year’s festival, and your Japan correspondent was on the case!
Osaka is mainly touted to tourists as ‘Japan’s kitchen’, and the city you go to after you’ve been to Tokyo. No, the other city – for when Kyoto starts feeling way too crowded, and you want to eat something that doesn’t have matcha in it.
What most people who can’t speak Japanese don’t know: Osaka is also Japan’s (spiritual and literal) home of comedy. The biggest comedy talent agency in the country is based here. The Osaka sense of humour is the one you see most often on Japanese TV, and it heavily inspired the typical ‘comedy’ dialect and the rapid-fire back and forth between double acts.
All of that said, the double acts and verbal sparring weren’t the focus here for once.
The festival was held in an open outdoor space in front of major train stations and shopping areas, a part of Osaka city that tourists flock to. Each act needed to transcend language barriers to draw a crowd and keep them laughing.
There are plenty of ways to be funny without saying a word, and we saw lots of them: physical comedy, magic tricks, circus tricks, balloon art – all performed with equal amounts of skill and humour. Comedy-adjacent genres can be just as funny when they’re done well.
A highlight of my day: watching a human Rube Goldberg machine powered by silent farts trying to get a ping pong ball into a man’s underwear, via a toilet plunger and a ‘tablecloth pull’ magic trick performed on the side of another man’s head using a pair of tights.
Yes, you read that sentence correctly the first time.
This was done by a group called The Tokyo Idiots, which just so happens to be what Osaka people like to nickname Tokyo people anyway. I’ll leave the rest of that act to your imagination…
Most spoken parts were intros and explanations by the event MCs, and those chatty people were the ones that press attendees had the opportunity to interview.
I got some time with bilingual talent Crazy Coco (pictured above). She’s helped host the festival 2 years in a row. (If you ask me, her stage name should be Classy Coco because she looked amazing.)
Coco’s also originally from the Osaka area, and believes this part of the country produces more comedians because residents get “a comedy education from birth”.
We didn’t have time to discuss her own background, but it’s an inspiring story: after catching Covid in 2021, she quit her day job and sent a video audition for Japan’s biggest competition for women in comedy, as ‘something I need to do before I die’. She didn’t win, but she was scouted at the semi-finals by that big comedy agency I was talking about and has been on their roster for over 4 years.
The question I had to ask: who is Crazy Coco’s favourite Japanese woman in comedy?
It’s Yuriyan Retriever, who UK audiences may know from international shows including America’s Got Talent. She also set her sights high, and is now a singer, actress, film director, and owner of a fitness wear brand.
We agreed that the amount of women in comedy over here is still relatively low, but that those who achieve success have massive ambition and drive. It’s much harder to break through and become a household name in comedy, so whenever a woman does she rarely stops there.
As all of the signage around the festival said: good fortune comes to those who laugh.
If Osaka Comedy Festival returns in 2027, Crazy Coco wants to MC again – and to see more solo stand-up comedy, which isn’t as well known or popular in Japan. If Funny Women gets another invite behind the scenes, maybe next time I’ll get video footage of the fart machine.
