The Pachinko Job... And Why I Would Never Want to be a Japanese Comedian

The set being dressed for the Pachinko Commercial

Right before I left for the states for Christmas, I had a job doing an infomercial for a Japanese kind of gambling called Pachinko. (Imagine slot machines that use pinballs and are encrusted with Japanese animation imagery and you get the idea). For myself this was actually a hard shoot to do because because of the location they were using. It was an old building where each floor had been converted into some kind of set (jail, hospital, dental office, etc).

Another one of the unused sets in the same building.

As they only actually needed me on set for about 15 minutes of the 10 hours I was there for, in the spring or fall, it would have been super cool, cuz I had a ton of time to write and study, but as an old building in the winter, it was rough. There was no central heating, and the holding area they had for myself and Ricky (a massive Jamaican dude whom I get jobs with from time to time) was only heated with these old oil burning heaters. Long story short- I was still cold the whole time and fumes from the heater was enough to give me a respiratory infection, and a wicked cough for most of the time I was back in the states.

Yet another interesting set... all within a relatively
 inconspicuous building on a normal looking street.

The funny thing about this however, was that I still didn't feel as though I had it the worst. As with virtually every time I've had to work with them, Im convinced that the guy who had it the worst on stage was the Comedian. One of the quirky things about Japan is that they really seem to love pain here. Examples of it are everywhere. People work for 12 hours a day five or six days a week simply to look like they are hardworking. Baseball players are pushed harder than Shaolin Monks, and S & M is popular enough that for a while it was fashionable to greet people for the first time by asking which one they were (Nice to meet you. So, are you S or M?) Absolutelu nowhere however is this love and affinity for pain more obvious than in Japanese variety shows, and I could swear that if you look up "Comedian" in a Japanese dictionary, it would read: "Person who is willing to take a substantial amount of physical abuse for a laugh, in the hopes that they can eventually get popular enough to turn it into a 6-figure career".

In this job, my and Ricky's job consisted of strapping this poor guy into a make-shift electric chair, and then running live currents through his hands. (Something that probably easily could have been faked except for the fact that "it wouldn't have been as funny"). In the job before that (for the same infomercial) it was my job to cover a cold pizza with ultra-ultra hot sauce and force him to eat it without anything to drink it down with. In that same job for another event, we had to make these people where helmits that had nostril hooks on them that were attached to a cord holding a bucket. Every few minutes as they tried to play the Pachinko game, Ricky and I would walk by and drop (literally drop) a bottle of water into the bucket, causing a sharp upward yank on their nostrils...and an increased amount of steady weight. In a job last year, I was actually paid to spray them with fire extinguishers, and slap them with pool floatations devices, and in the most epic of these kinds of jobs, I had to hide in the back of a stretch hummer while two played a game and as soon as one made a mistake, jump out, physically abuse them, yell "You f*cking loser!!" in Japanese, and then simply get out the car and walk away.

A group of 4 of us abusing Japanese comedians for the
variety show, Sekai Marumie.

Very strange indeed. Why they need a big black dude in a black suit to inflict these tortures still escapes me, but the fact of the matter is, as long as they want to keep paying me to do it, (and I never have to be the recipient) I'm not complaining. Sometimes it is really damn funny, and as long as they are getting paid for it, better them than me.