Monthly Girls' Nozaki-Kun is a hilarious comedy anime and the characters are all funny in different ways. But who gets the biggest laughs?
Monthly Girls' Nozaki-Kun is an excellent comedy anime currently streaming on such platforms as Crunchyroll and Netflix. When Chiyo Sakura tries to confess her feelings to her classmate, mangaka Umetaro Nozaki, he misunderstands and assumes she wants to help him draw his manga. Chiyo finds herself brought onto his staff and into a truly wild and hilarious friendship.
The cast is full of colorful characters, each with its own unique style of comedy. Whether they're straight men like Hori and Miyamae or wild cards like Mikoto or Seo, all of them are good for endless laughs.
Miyamae is Nozaki's long-suffering supervising editor. He is a staid and relatively average guy, who really did nothing to deserve coworkers that send his blood pressure through the roof. He's not wrong in wondering sometimes if he's the only sane one among them.
The funniest interactions are between him and Nozaki, who, thanks to being traumatized by his previous editor, Maeno, worships the ground he walks on simply because he actually bothers to edit the manga. Nozaki's puppyish enthusiasm for his feedback met with Miyamae's exasperation is great.
A fellow mangaka whose work is published in the same magazine as Nozaki's Let's Fall in Love!, Yukari is a kind and cheerful person ... perhaps too kind, though. In trying to be accommodating to everyone in her life, she ends up creating issues for herself in one of the best anime about creating anime and manga.
Between repeatedly giving in to meddling editor Maeno's ridiculous alterations to her manga, to keeping the smiling mask on her face when presented with difficult questions, making herself look shadier than she actually is, Yukari's intense passiveness results in awkwardly funny situations.
Maeno is Nozaki's former editor and possibly the biggest thorn in his side. The combination of his chipper and overly friendly demeanor and his incredibly lazy and meddlesome habits as an editor elicit greater and funnier fits of frustration from Nozaki than anything else.
He either has zero sense of boundaries or just doesn't much care about them, as he is constantly forcing his presence on his mangaka and his own very specific interests into their manga. Who knows why he's so obsessed with tanuki? All that matters is that it's funny.
The president of the Drama Club, Hori has a similar "only sane man surrounded by idiots" shtick as Miyamae, but his very vocal expressions of frustration and disapproval make him even funnier. A common target of his outbursts is well-meaning but somewhat scatterbrained Yuu Kashima.
In addition, he is also one of the only people perceptive enough to notice that Nozaki has been using his classmates as models for the characters of his shoujo manga, making his interactions with them awkward as he struggles not to call them by the characters' names. Once he starts noticing things, he can't let them go.
Main protagonist Chiyo often serves as the straight man (or girl, as it happens) to her much wackier classmates. Though she is genuinely a kind and friendly person, she has a bitingly sarcastic inner monologue going in response to the constant shenanigans of one of the funniest comedy anime to watch right now.
However, she can be just as funny on her own, with her tendency to get swept up in things she never intended for. In the episode "This Love is Being Turned Into a Shoujo Manga," in addition to how she became Nozaki's assistant in the first place, one of her first tasks is helping Nozaki create references for a bike-riding scene, ending up riding up and down the street with him in a series of increasingly ridiculous poses.
Seo's brash, violent personality is a source of utter terror to the students of Roman Academy, but a source of pure comedy for the viewers. In addition to being over-the-top aggressive in everything she does, she also has no filter and will say exactly what she thinks at all times.
Possibly the funniest running gag involving her is her participation in the school's Chorus Club. She has a sweet, beautiful voice that entrances anyone who hears it, earning her the nickname "Lorelai." Her often picked-on classmate, Wakamatsu, can't stand Seo but is head over heels in love with Lorelai, and nobody has the heart to tell him that they're one and the same.
Wakamatsu is Nozaki's mild-mannered friend, another assistant in his manga, and one of voice actor Ryohei Kimura's best characters. His humor comes from his utter refusal to acknowledge that the rules of wooing women in shoujo manga do not actually apply to real life, and his bafflement when his attempts go wrong.
He is a frequent victim of Seo's pranks and bullying, understandably not realizing that they are her attempts to get her crush's attention the only way she knows how. His meek, sensitive personality clashing with her loud, aggressive one leads Nozaki to recognize the humor in their interactions and base manga characters on them both.
Nozaki's best friend and assistant is funny enough on his own, with his awkward and easily flustered personality. But he is at his absolute best when paired with another character to play off of, which is why he, Chiyo, and Nozaki make such a great trio and why this is one of the anime most deserving of a Hollywood adaptation.
In the episode "There Are Times When Men Must Fight," he and Nozaki play an otome game together and get overly attached to the best friend NPC, Tomoda. They want to give Tomoda a happier ending but conclude that the only possible romance option for him is the protagonist. So they pull an all-nighter drawing manga centered around the two characters.
A key ingredient of good comedy is sincerity: if it's not done in absolute earnest, it can't be truly funny. Yuu Kashima, the intensely popular prince of the school, might not fully understand everything that's going on around her, but everything she does and says is absolutely sincere, which makes her a joy to watch.
In the episodem "If This Feeling Isn't Love, Then There Is No Love At All," Kashima gleefully explains to Chiyo how Hori told her he didn't want homemade chocolates for Valentine's Day, so she "tricked" him by putting her own homemade chocolate in a store-bought chocolates' box. Chiyo, puzzled, wonders if this means she actually hates Hori, to which Kashima replies no: of course, it's because she likes him!
Despite Nozaki's demeanor, he is smart and happy to please; however, he isn't always on the same wavelength as everyone else. A standout example of his type of humor is in "The Girl Prince of the School's Problems," in which Hori pointing out height discrepancies in his manga leads to Nozaki drawing the characters on boxes to fix them. When Hori doesn't go for it, Nozaki earnestly fixes that by having a character say that boxes are their school's new fad, leading Hori to yell that he fixed the wrong thing.
He is the definition of comically serious. Nozaki's impressive stone face and blunt, eccentric behavior are on just about 24/7, making his interactions with other people funny whether he sticks to them, or breaks from them in a rare expression of visible enthusiasm.
