Pop Team Epic – Episode 1

What’s it about? Two trash schoolgirls bounce from one pop culture reference to another in this rapid-fire absurdist comedy.

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Nobody else wanted to try writing about this one, so your managing editor is in da house to take one for the team. Pop Team Epic appears to be 24 minutes (but really only 12 minutes) (I’m still not even sure it’s actually full-length?) of carefully crafted trolling. There’s a reason the most iconic image is of the two girls gleefully flipping off the readers, you know.

Let’s start with some positives: Broadly speaking, it’s kind of great to see a weird comedy starring trash female characters. I grew up during the era of “man as foolish and funny, woman as straight-laced and serious” comedies, so I’m always pleased to see shows that allow women and girls to be just as crass, goofy, or pop culture-savvy as the men.

Speaking of that crassness, while Pop Team‘s sense of humor is sophomoric at times (again, see the image of them flipping the bird), I don’t have any real content warnings for it. The two girls are neither sexualized nor infantilized, and the “humor” doesn’t appear to be punching down (unless I’m missing any references, which I certainly could be).

I suppose you could argue that three-quarters of the girls being voiced by men is supposed to be funny for vaguely transphobic reasons, but their performances are subdued enough that it doesn’t come across as an intentional “man in a dress” joke. [EDIT: Turns out the male voice actors are nod to a joke from the manga.] Basically, if you wanted to try it, there’s nothing in it that you need to be seriously worried about.

That having been said, I also can’t promise that Pop Team will be up your alley, because I’m not entirely sure where this alley is even located. I keep calling it a “comedy,” but I think it’d be fairer to call it an anti-comedy, because there are few, if any, actual punchlines. It’s a multitude of setups with almost no payoff. It is the Infinite Jest of gag shows, a novel I didn’t hate but am still half-convinced was all an elaborate 1000-page troll.

Given that most of Pop Team‘s 30-second sketches are based on some other piece of fiction (TV, video games, etc.), I suppose you could call it “referential humor,” but that suggests there is a joke, and there often isn’t. The bit is usually just “this is a reference to a thing, isn’t it funny that we are making a reference to this thing.” It alludes but rarely parodies.

I’ve seen Pop Team compared to Robot Chicken, but that’s unfair to the effort Robot Chicken put in to making its sketches accessible even to people who were only vaguely aware of the source material. Pop Team doesn’t care if it isn’t accessible, and it frequently is not.

All of this is compounded by the anime’s format, which crams as many of the original four-panel comics into a 12-minute span at once. I’ve seen some of the comics floating around online, and while I’ve always found them extremely hit-or-miss, the ability to slowly read or even re-read each one allows you time to figure out the reference, soak in the absurdity, and appreciate whatever meme-like non-joke it’s making.

This adaptation gives you zero time to soak. It’s not just throwing things at a wall; it’s stuffing them inside a pitching machine and cranking the speed up to 100mph. It bludgeoned me with sketches until I gave up on even trying to recognize the references, let alone laugh at them.

I can, in a general way, appreciate the sheer brazenness of rejecting every humor-writing rule in the book in the same way I can appreciate Dadaist paintings or theatre of the absurd. Pop Team Epic wants to know if I’m mad yet, and the answer is no. But that doesn’t mean I want to sit through it for 24 (or even 12) minutes every week, either.