This site treats comedy the way software engineering treats design patterns: as a set of recurring structures that already exist, that can be named, and that can then be chosen on purpose instead of rediscovered by accident.
Japanese comedy is unusually explicit about this. Performers and audiences share a working vocabulary — boke, tsukkomi, furi, ochi, tendon — and most of what looks like an untranslatable cultural joke turns out to be one of a small number of arrangements being run again. This site names nineteen of those arrangements and explains, for each one, what the structure is, what conditions it needs, and what it costs when it is used in the wrong place.
Where it comes from
The Japanese edition of this site has been published since 2022, and the nineteen patterns have been written, revised, and used there since then. This is not a set assembled for an English launch; it is the same catalogue, developed in Japanese over years of describing everyday conversation, manzai, anime and variety television, and corrected whenever a pattern turned out to be two patterns or a distinction turned out not to hold.
The Japanese edition remains the canonical version:
What the English edition is — and is not
It is not a translation. Every English article here is written from scratch for a reader who does not speak Japanese and did not grow up with the reference points.
That changes the job in a specific way. A translated article would carry over comparisons that only work in Japanese, and would leave a reader guessing whether tendon is the same thing as a stand-up callback, whether oyakusoku is just the English idea of a trope, and whether noritsukkomi has any English name at all. So every English pattern article has a section devoted to the closest English-language equivalent and to exactly where the two come apart — which is usually where the useful information is.
The pattern names stay in romanized Japanese with a short English gloss, because that is what these structures are actually called, and because translating several of them outright would create a false friend rather than a definition.
Where this site’s own analysis goes beyond what the Japanese craft vocabulary settles — for instance in modelling the timing of tendon as a three-way split between too early, right, and too late — the English articles say so, rather than presenting the model as established terminology.
What is available in English right now
Four of the nineteen patterns have full English articles so far:
- Tendon — the delayed callback
- Gap — the character who breaks their own type
- Oyakusoku — the ending everyone saw coming
- Noritsukkomi — play along, then call it out
The remaining fifteen are listed with a one-line description on Japanese Comedy Design Patterns, the hub article, and full articles are being added over time. Until an article exists, the hub entry is the summary — and the Japanese edition already has the complete version.