Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5's Moments of Crappy Cliched Comedy

As I’ve mentioned before and will doubtless say again, Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5 is, in many regards, an excellent refinement of the methods and qualities of its predecessors, Persona 3 and 4.  In general, Persona 5 takes what worked for its forebears, and leaves or improves upon that which didn’t, to create a tighter, better product.

In general.

But there are still some (ironically) noticeable blind spots in the Persona formula present in this title, and probably the most outright annoying is a certain, sadly familiar style of humor that still pops up now and then.  Because while Persona 5 is leaps and bounds ahead of its immediate predecessor in this regard, there are nonetheless times in which its comedy is the same kind of brainless, dead-on-arrival tasteless try-hard cliches that plagued Persona 4’s attempts at humor again and again.

If you’ve played a few JRPGs or watched an anime or 2, you’ve definitely encountered this kind of stupidity before.  Whenever a talentless writer needs to inject some comedy into their creation but lacks the capacity to actually write a joke, they reach for any the following 4 sacred tenets of anime humor:

1. Males have sexual urges
2. Females can be pressured into being sexual*
3. Homosexuals were created by God to entertain us; that’s all we know, Rick
4. A woman who can’t cook is an abomination that should be ostracized, exiled, and possibly drawn and quartered

And so, because a few incompetent jerks in the formative days of manga decided that they wanted toxic masculinity to be the comical backbone of their art form, lazy “writers” have been able for decades to just hastily slap any of those 4 ideas onto their work and pretend it’s a punchline.  If you’ve played a few JRPGs, chances are that you’ve encountered at least 1 kind of this stupidity before.  Maybe you’ve noticed Fire Emblem’s love for reducing entire interpersonal character arcs down to Number 4 on that list, or you rolled your eyes with impatience at the “amusing” gay merchants of Shadow Hearts born from Number 3.  Hell, I know you’ve encountered 1 of those godawful hot spring scenes at some point inspired by Point 1 up there.

And if you’ve played Persona 4, well, you’ve encountered the whole gamut, multiple times, because between things like Yosuke’s recurring need to diminish Kanji with wisecracks about being gay, and Teddie trying to be the world’s first restraining order collector, SMTP4 is just choking itself on cheap, stale gags.  In fact, Persona 4 contains within it the Holy Grail of anime non-humor comedy: an episode of the story which crams all 4 anti-jokes together into 1 distasteful, humor-murdering miracle.  The school camping trip in Persona 4 manages to combine Kanji getting beaten up while trying to prove he’s not gay, the girls being shitty cooks, Yosuke demanding that women wear swimsuits for him, and the girls actually unhappily doing so out of some feeling of debt for having cooked badly. The total tetrad of terrible tenets tied into 1 tidy, staid sack of trash.  And to think they even managed to work in a vomit gag to garnish it!  Truly masters at their fucking craft, the writers of Persona 4.

But even though it never reaches anywhere near the same quantity or extreme of unfunny, off-putting indignity that it did in Persona 4, the use of this style of crappy cliche non-humor is even more grating when it does occasionally arise in Persona 5.  How, you might wonder?  Because even by the metric of the kind of mentally listless loser who laughs at “guys liek boobeez and grls has them” because he’s been told it’s a punchline, these dull shenanigans are completely unnecessary!  Though it’s hardly an excuse, let’s face it, SMT Persona 4 really just didn’t HAVE much else it could fall back on for comedy beyond these sad tropes; there’s only so much mileage you can get from Adachi being hapless and unmotivated, Yukiko’s laughing fits are so fucking cringe it should be considered a sin, and Jesus, Yosuke, just fucking hold it IN already.  But by contrast, Persona 5 is, most of the time, actually really good at creating levity!

The overall conversations and group dynamics of the Phantom Thieves are entertaining and naturally lend themselves to chuckle-worthy banter and scenarios.  Persona 5 doesn’t need to resort to using gay people as punching bags, or fixating on a high school girl being pressured into nude modeling, or reminding us that teenage boys have hormones as they Doordash a maid fetish, or any of the other “humor” of idiot perverts who both never grew out of the, and are currently in their, 80s!  The game already naturally finds its appealing comedy groove with Ann and Ryuji’s back-and-forth partner-in-crime banter, Sojiro’s delusions of suaveness, the disaster that is Yusuke’s finances, Yoshizawa’s athlete appetite, and much more.  The game can already seemingly effortlessly create dialogues and situations in which it’s the actions, personalities, and quirks of its characters from which the comedy is created; it doesn’t NEED to resort to generic “hurr hurr” jokes clumsily pasted onto it!

Great example: at a certain point in the story, the Phantom Thieves are visiting Shinjuku, as a step in their efforts against Kaneshiro.  During this scene, a couple of gay stereotype NPCs show up, and it goes something like this:

“Oh look, a couple of people whose sexual proclivities differ from those of the writer!  Surely they exist only to be wacky clowns for our entertainment.  Let us simply walk off, and leave our friend Ryuji alone with them so that they may effect their Gay upon him, to his great dismay!  What truly ribald jocularity!”

It’s an off-putting joke with no payoff, but more than that, it’s made superfluous by the basic, natural humor and comical chemistry that the game already has in play!  At the beginning of this section, you’re able to, in the course of Morgana’s posturing as he tells Ren about Shinjuku, select an option to casually tell the uppity cat that he can be Ren’s escort.  It sends Morgana mentally scrambling to figure out how Ren even knows about that sort of thing, and boom, there you go, a little moment of levity born from the natural back-and-forth between the game’s characters!  Mission accomplished, chuckle had!  There’s even the bonus guffaw of Ryuji having come to explore the red light district without changing out of his school uniform!  The comedy checkmark was already there for this brief arc, with no need for some try-hard, grandiose gesture of cliched comedy that comes out of nowhere and has no connection whatever to anything else.  Honestly, it’s just baffling that the writers think that they have to throw in this shit, when they’re already doing a great job of entertaining the player with the moments of mirth that organically exist in the story and its cast.

And to be clear, SMTP5’s actual, genuine comedy chops aren’t just limited to dialogue-based quips and bits.  You might assume that the game only resorts to the crappy anime cliches as a way of rounding its levity out to include situational humor in motion, but no, it’s perfectly capable of being quite funny with its setups and events in its own right.  When investigating Futaba, for example, there’s a scene in which the lights go out, and Makoto, startled, panics and begs Ren to hold her hand for reassurance.  And Ren just stands there, all “Sorry babe, I’m just too cool to take my hands out of my pockets, can’t help you.”  Makoto’s losing her goddamn mind here, and the absolute most this Arms Akimbo motherfucker’s willing to do is offer her a goddamn elbow to cling to, and she hangs onto that thing like she’s on a subway train being driven by Mr. Magoo at rush hour.  Whether you’re chuckling at the calm and collected Makoto having a meltdown over the mildest spooky situation ever, or, more likely, at Ren’s adamant refusal to compromise his aloof anime vibe, it’s a great example of Persona 5 being able to have a funny situation with humor in motion.  So again, the game’s clearly capable of hitting its comedy quota without lowering itself to the shitty tropes.

Using this kind of anime cliche comedy is also stupidly contradictory to the story and spirit of the game.  Isn’t the biggest, most major purpose of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5 to sharply criticize the crippling culture of cultish collectivism that curses the country of Japan?  The story of Persona 5 takes pains to show how wrong, unfair, and damaging it is to look down on others simply for being outside the norm in some way again and again.  Ren as a supposed delinquent on probation, Sojiro as an adoptive guardian to Futaba instead of a biological family member, Ryuji as a problem student, Futaba as a person whose trauma and anxiety necessitate special considerations, Ann having few meaningful relationships in her life because of her visibly different ethnicity...the game provides many examples of admirable people who suffer because of a society that dismisses, shuns, or outright punishes them for being different from what’s expected.  They’re judged on what they are instead of who they are, their potential determined by scorn of their difference instead of measure of their character, and the intense, burning wrongness of this mindset is held up again and again by Persona 5 in its passionate plea for a change.

And yet, in the midst of this noble ambition, even as the writers deftly prove their point with other characters...they resort to a cheap, lazy, mindless gag about gay stereotypes!  The game has introduced a couple of NPCs whose only, single purpose is to play up a shallow view that those with a sexuality outside the norm are defined solely by that trait, weird and undesirable to be around, and if they get you alone they’ll try to turn YOU gay, omg ewwwww amirite lol???  This moronic comedy trope is obviously, violently counter to possibly the biggest theme of the entire game!

And when these stupid comedy cliches don’t contradict Persona 5’s ideals, they clash with its characters, story, and direction.  Why exactly is the game telling us to giggle over the idea of Ann being put into an uncomfortable situation regarding being a nude model?  Isn’t the major, instigating injustice inflicted on Ann a matter of sexual harassment?  Isn’t the most defining quality of Ann’s heroism the anguish she’s experienced over the sexual abuse that her Shiho suffered?  Why the actual FUCK are we making a JOKE of sexualizing the character whose greatest motivation is the lingering trauma and tragedy of SEXUAL ABUSE!?

Thankfully--so goddamn thankfully--these shitty comedy tropes make far fewer incursions into Persona 5’s narrative than they did into 4’s.  SMTP5 is a diverting, amusing game rich with quips and jokes, but most of its comedy is born of the characters and situations organic to its narrative course, rather than manufactured and clumsily tacked on for a cheap supposed laugh.  Sure, not EVERY joke lands, and some of the recurring ones do get overplayed, but by and large, SMT Persona 5’s comedy scene is a huge improvement over its immediate predecessor’s.  Still, the game does sprinkle in some of these exhausted, unfunny, braindead tropes here and there, clearly out of unthinking reflex, and it’s annoying, because they’re totally unneeded in a game that’s already got enough real, fitting humor, and they often ignore or even undermine the game’s better content.










   




* Caveat: Unless they’re uggos, then of course they’re too sexually forward for comfort, because it’s just so fucking funny.