It’s back everyone, Isekai Ojisan is back! It’s been to weeks without the seasons premier comedy. And what happens on it’s first week back? Well… It falls a little flat if I can be honest. Lets dive in and talk about why.
So like I said, I’m pretty mixed on this weeks Ojisan. On the good side, the jokes were mostly fine. Baseball terminology being scary, Mabel’s return, the ring joke again, etc. Even a complete repeat of making a girl fall for him, with a melting sword/heart metaphor in the background, only to completely undercut it with his own stupidity. Making her go from rejecting him to thinking she was rejected herself. It’s all strictly fine. I wish that Ojisan had some more original material this week, stuff like the Youtube ad crisis was absolutely hilarious. But this isn’t the worst rut to be stuck in I suppose. Sadly however, these were not all of the jokes in the episode. In fact there was one in particular that kind of put me off the whole thing: The rape joke.
I suppose this was inevitable when you think about it. Ojisan’s entire premise is riffing on Isekai. From Sword Art Online to GATE. Eventually it would have to take shots at the more incely isekai like Mushoku Tensei and Redo Healer. But if this was that attempt, I don’t think it succeeded. The way it was framed as a follow up to the Uncle being a moron, the compromising position, etc etc. He was defending himself in that instance yet the way the joke was framed turned that defense into him being the assaulter. I suppose that’s kind of the point, Ojisan at least made it clear that sort of shit wasn’t ok. But it didn’t really land as a joke for me. I didn’t find it funny, just… weird? I don’t know, I feel like that whole second half of the joke was a miss for me.
On the plus side, we did get a bit more about Ojisan’s world this episode. It’s not terribly important, I don’t think any of the world building for the joke isekai world really is, but I’ll take what positives I can get. Plus the whole thing about him not being the first person from Japan in that world was setup for an actually decent joke: The wish. The wish itself was pretty straightforward and unremarkable, but I absolutely loved this idea of God just phoning it in. Giving up on all that bullshit and setting up an answering machine style wish generator. For some reason that concept just tickles me, way more than the rape and Mabel stuff previously did. So at least because of that I got to end the episode on a middling note.
But yeah, that’s pretty much it for the episode. Not as much to say about the return as I would like, but the episode didn’t do anything all to great. The jokes were middling at best and cringe at worst and no one really cares about the Isekai world building. I don’t want to give Ojisan to much crap, comedy is pretty situational at the best of times. I just hope that Ojisan manages to find it’s way back to the more clever stuff next episode.
