Three bored teenage girls—Hanako, Kasumi, Olivia—decide to form a high school club, the “Party People Club”, where they can spend their time playing board games or pranks in a classroom.
“Asobi Asobase” is the darnedest thing—it doesn’t have a real plot, nor a 3-act structure, nor some character development for that matter—as it only intends to be a “stress free” wacky comedy describing the buffoonery of high school days, and yet it is able to actually pull it off and get away with it. The three main characters, the teenage girls Kasumi, Hanako and Olivia, are just so wacky and demented that it is worth watching this anime just for their interaction. Each episode is basically just a set of four short sketches, revolving around them playing games in their school club, and thus the only thing the authors were aiming at is pure, sheer humor. The mood can already be described in the 1st episode, when the three girls are in a bikini, sitting around a small inflatable swimming pool in the classroom. As the camera shows the busty cleavage of Kasumi, it cuts to a black-and-white caricature “Psycho” Zombie face of someone, who turns out to be the flat-chested Hanako, jealous of her. As Hanako asks what can be done to make her own breasts grow, Kasumi says that “gaining weight helps”, as Hanako imagines a “Jabba the Hutt”-style version of Olivia with 500 pounds, but her chest size is only two sizes larger.
Games are mostly at the center of these episodes, and one features a dare bet: for Hanako to sniff the girls’ armpit. While Kasumi’s armpit smells actually pleasant, after smelling Olivia’s, Hanako goes into a comic seizure on the floor, scratching her own nose, while Kasumi says it reminds her of the behavior of a cat trying to get stench out of her brain when her dad farts. A similar joke arrives when the three girls are hiding under a desk, yet Olivia’s face is right next to Hanako’s butt, who just happens to have bowel movements at the time, thinking: “Dear Fart-god, let me squeeze a little one without a sound!” The best episode is arguably #8, since it has the highest ratio of successful punchlines among them all. In the first sketch, Olivia is playing a new game app on her mobile phone, "Find bacteria around you", and as a joke tries it on Hanako, only to find out that Hanako's notebook pad has escherichia coli bacteria. Both Olivia and Kasumi wonder how that could have happened, until there's a flashback of a cat "scratching" its butt on the notebook, while Hanako giggles and thinks that's cute. A very sympathetic joke later on involves a dare of the girls to pose in front of a teacher on the hallway and do a pose and a speech from "Sailor Moon" and "Dragonball", but both of them blush while doing it. Not every joke works, though, since a lot of the story feels like a hit-or-miss affair, "Family Guy"-style, and some supporting characters are unnecessary (the bizarre "witch" girl in three episodes), whereas its frenetic pace is a matter of taste, having even characters talk 50% faster than usual to try to stuff as many jokes as possible. "Asobi Asobase" is a random collection of disparate jokes, yet since anime rarely takes on a satisfaying comedy path, it is a welcome experience.
Grade:+++
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