Chuck on Joshi Anna No Batsu (Female Announcer Punishment) -Japanese Variety Show

Greetings all. Just found a link to probably the most enjoyable shoot Ive ever had in Japan. It was for a Japanese Variety show called Joshi Anna No Batsu, and I was there for pretty much the whole show. Basically, the concept of the show is that there is a particular style of Japanese comedy where someone does something that is just incredibly wrong, and then their partner has to try to make people laugh by making a witty comment about it.

For this show, they decided to take 3 Japanese female TV announcers, and then put them in a restaurant where everything is "incredibly wrong". (for example, the free cup of water they are given is a one liter pitcher), and they have to try and make funny comments about it... and as is always the case on Japanese television, the one who performs the worst is punished.

For myself, this was an incredibly fun shoot, because it gave me a chance to do ad-lib comedy. Nothing was really scripted. I just got to make it up as I went. Probably the best scene (I felt) was an ongoing stream of farts, and while only part of it made it into the show, it was a riot to do.

The link to watch it works well... provided you don't mind watching KFC commercials in Chinese. ;) Anyway, here it is:

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNTE1OTcwOTUy.html

Understanding the end
What's going on in the end is that the three announcers are lined up, and are told they will be punished. They are told "Angelina Jolie". Two out of the three respond with something like, "What? There's no Angelina Jolie here!" but the third says nothing, so as she was the different one, she is the one who must face the actual punishment. Punishment balls are placed into a box. (Each ball has a different punishment- one, for example, is having to each 10 cucumbers that go really well with a particular sauce and having very little of that actual sauce). In the end the punishment she gets is she has to dress up like a character from a Japanese cartoon that was always sweeping the house, and then sweep the ice on a busy ice skating rink... while the other ones give her commands like "go chase those children".

Anyway, I went to this shoot, expecting my role to be almost nothing, but in the end, I absolutely had a blast. Would love to do more stuff like this if I get a chance!

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. 

Wedding bells... and a kick to the stomach.

Last saturday, was probably the most interesting job I`ve ever had. Basically, I was paid to show up at this guy`s wedding dressed as a kickboxer, and then to officiate a hyper-spicy curry eating contest. The loser of which I was supposed to kick (without holding back).

And who should be loser be, of course, but the groom. I felt kinda bad for the guy, but a job`s a job and ultimately, he was the one paying, so needless to say I did what I was paid to do... and it was hilarous.

Its stuff like this that make life out here so endlessly fascinating. When in the states cpuld I ever get paid to blast a dude because he can`t handle his curry?

It was also interesting because it turned out that the MC of the wedding was a friend of mine from my volunteering days, so after I completed the job, I was allowed to just hang out, drink (for free) with him, and I even got to keep the kickboxing uniform for free. (Gloves, shorts, everything). ONLY IN JAPAN. Life is good. ;)