"Dearest Mother: We're thinking of portraying various dramas from everyday life from now on.
[Beat]
Just kidding. This episode was a one time thing."
[Beat]
Just kidding. This episode was a one time thing."
— Kamiyama, Cromartie High School
A comedic show specifically concentrating on being humorous before any concern of plot, drama or even comprehensibility. Noted for a complete lack of tact or pomposity on the part of the writers, and frequent postmodern commentary. Can have occasional Fanservice which the series will openly acknowledge. The Rule of Funny will be observed.
Because they don't take themselves seriously, gag series tend to experiment across the board with parody, lewd humor, random cutaways, and short-lived drama. In a win-win situation, these can be very successful experiments when they succeed, or mocked by the series itself when they fail as a protective tactic. Ironically, they can be praised for presenting such topics without being Anvilicious. However, doing this at the end of a series can cause accusations of being pretentious.
Anime gag series often use a Puni Plush design. Many are also a Quirky Work. Shows that depend a lot on puns and parody are typically considered too difficult for commercial releases, and are fansubbed only erratically. A few even get a Gag Dub.
Anime and Manga are particularly notorious in this genre. Series will regularly go over the top in their nonsense and hilarity even within the context of the show itself. Characters will time-travel, change species or gender, die, destroy buildings, cities, or planets, anything that will push the ridiculousness even higher; also note that these effects are rarely, if ever, permanent. There are times when "normality" is broken and restored in the space of a few minutes.
Occasionally the Gag Series is an adaptation of some "canonical" source, except now the writers pretty much do whatever they like.
See also Big-Lipped Alligator Moment, for cases where an otherwise coherent story has occasional Gag Series interludes. Live-action television examples tend to be the Sketch Comedy, which can overlap with the Gag Series.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, REALLY Love You: Along with having No Fourth Wall, the series heavily parodies the harem genre and its tropes.
- The Adventures of Mini-Goddess is a Spin-Off of Ah! My Goddess, featuring Fun Size versions of the goddesses and a talking rat named Gan constantly suffering Amusing Injuries during 48 7-minute episodes filled with wacky hijinks.
- Aho Girl is about an incredibly stupid girl and the trouble she and her friends get into. Slapstick abounds.
- Ai-Mai-Mi is about a ragtag Four-Girl Ensemble who use their expertise as mangakas to create extremely absurd adventures, usually as a result of their imagination being out there, while also going on said absurd adventures when not partaking in the activity. There's also a plethora of Comedic Sociopathy caused by the resident ditzes of the quartet.
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons - Deserted Island Diary: Since the main games are a Life-Sim, they don't have too much in the way of a storyline. As a result, the manga goes this route, following the antics of the island inhabitants.
- Aoi House is part anime/manga parody, part American media parody (multiple references to Grey's Anatomy, and at one point a character is found to be singing the theme song to Cardcaptors), and entirely hilarious.
- Akazukin Chacha: A Fantastic Comedy centered around an inept apprentice sorceress and the bizarre scenarios and messes that she and her two male best friends often get into, either at their magic academy or when traveling on an adventure. The anime turns the main character into a Magical Girl Warrior, but it still doesn't detract from the wild comedy.
- Azumanga Daioh downplays this since the series actually does have continuity and plot, but each episode by itself is purely just a string of jokes.
- Beelzebub: Can't seem to take itself seriously even when trying to be shounen.
- Bikini Warriors: Four-minute long episodes about fantasy class females wearing only bikinis. This anime is loaded up with plenty of Fanservice, parodies the fantasy genre, has nonsensical plots (if you can call them plots) and provides plenty of laughs.
- Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo: Plots constructed entirely out of bad puns, sight gags, and pop-culture flotsam.
- Carnival Phantasm being an Affectionate Parody of the Nasuverse, has gotten quite hilarious EVERYTIME AND EVERYWHERE!
- Clean Freak! Aoyama-kun is full of characters with weird antics and is prone to switching to a Super-Deformed art style for most of its comedy which revolves around Aoyama's touch aversion and Neat Freak tendencies and other characters.
- Colorful (1997). A couple of braindead losers and surprisingly innocent ecchi. The show makes fun of itself and perverts.
- DD Fist of the North Star is a Super-Deformed parody series of the much more serious Fist of the North Star. There are two series sharing this name, both presuming that the end in the original's After the End setting never happened. Both shows are heavily referential towards iconic moments and memes of the original.
- The first is a web based Flash show, and is mostly slice-of-life with its humor.
- The second is considerably more comedy based, with Raoh, Toki, and Kenshiro described repeatedly as 'the three idiot brothers' attempting to find work with a convenience store, where everyone has been given an Idiot Ball of their own and Bat of all people is now a Deadpan Snarker Straight Man and possibly the Only Sane Man of the show.
- Dash Kappei is a parody of the Sports manga genre, focusing on a small and perverted Tiny School Boy who is great at basketball. The series is full of wacky humor, slapstick, and all the sports games are completely surreal.
- Delicious in Dungeon is this at the start before the plot really gets going. The first few chapters have an episodic feel where Team Touden is mainly just going around the dungeon's first floors killing and eating whatever monster they come across.
- The Disastrous Life of Saiki K., which centers around a psychic with powers so strong he could destroy the world in a few days who, more than anything, wants to be left alone to watch TV and eat coffee jelly. Unfortunately, the wacky cast that flocks toward him make this impossible, forcing him to use his powers to either save them or get himself out of inconvenient situations.
- Dr. Slump is this, focusing on Robot Girl Arale, her creator and wacky inventor Senbei Norimaki and a whole cast of eccentric characters such as a police officer in a Stormtrooper helmet, a Superman parody named Suppaman and even talking poop.
- Dragon Ball started off as this for its first several arcs, and is repeatedly called a gag series in the manga during these arcs. Once King Piccolo showed up, however, the story began taking itself much more seriously. Since the darker tone has been present for a greater portion of the franchise's lifespan, the fact that it began as a vulgar comedy is often overlooked.
- That said, its roots as a gag series still shine through from time to time, with villains that do elaborate poses in the style of Super Sentai characters, or moments like Goku having to catch his teacher's pet monkey as part of his training. The Majin Buu arc especially reads like a marriage between the silly and serious sides of the manga; Majin Buu is a fat, pink demon that goes around turning people into candy, but he's also a serious threat and slaughters entire cities. Goku and Vegeta do a silly-looking fusion dance that makes them even more powerful, and at one point they kick Buu's ass after being turned into a coffee-flavored jawbreaker.
- Dungeon Toilet offers the occasional bit of educational content concerning toileting, but its main concern is comedy — largely of the Toilet Humor variety, naturally.
- Every Day is a Holiday: An absurd, 3-panel daily manga that involves two girls experiecing a plethora of different holidays and getting into amusing situations due to them, such as installing an escalator into their house for March 8th (Escalator Day) and attempting to create a new species for May 22nd (Biodiversity Day).
- Excel♡Saga: A mockery of everyday Japanese life seen through the lives of two supervillain henchgirl temp workers and four municipal Sentai employees. Then Shinichi Watanabe turned it into an anime and made fun of every anime genre in existence.
- FLCL: Although there is a plot, you would be hard-pressed to find someone that could identify which parts are gags and which are not in the first viewing. Additionally, this show has been described as Excel♡Saga on Excel Saga. The creators themselves admitted that about half of what they put into this show were completely a result of nonsense, and what they found funny at the time.
- Galaxy Angel: The animated equivalent of Dada Comics — nothing is sacred, and the writers are by-and-large allowed to run with whatever they like. Including scissors.
- Genji Tsuushin Agedama: An action-comedy series centered around an alien Kid Hero-in-training, coming to Earth on vacation no less, and his battle with his stuck-up classmate and her gang's goal of world domination. Originally starting as a simple gag work that focused on jokes and absurdity above all else, the series gradually parodies and even ad-libs other popular bits of Japanese pop-culture of the era (other anime series, movies, game shows, live-action dramas, etc,) with some perverted moments now and then.
- Gintama: The series is one big walking fourth-wall-breaking, parodying and absolutely nonsensical anime/manga. Though with a healthy pinch of action and good ol' Shōnen standbys, like the power of friendship.
- Goldfish Warning!. The show has a paper-thin plot, little to no continuity, 7 is just the random insane adventures of a particular class in a farm school.
- The Gothic World Of Nyanpire: The anime and manga, at first might sound strange to you. But just watching an episode of the anime can be very amusing depending on the episode. Since Nyanpire is completely different compared to classic vampires and Dracula.
- Gugure! Kokkuri-san: A girl gets into wacky hijinks with the three supernatural spirits who had invited themselves into her house. Whatever happens in one chapter would almost certainly be reverted to before the next one starts, and the story moves on as if nothing had happened. At one point, the manga decides to make a storyline continue for more than 1 chapter, and the main character expresses surprise that the previous event hasn't been reset.
- Hakushon Daimaō: A little boy named Kan-chan finds two genies in a bottle, an inept father and mischievious daughter. Hilarity ensues when Kan-chan's wishes are granted. This is essentially a gag anime in spite of the Sudden Downer Ending where the two genies have to leave Earth for 100 years.
- Haré+Guu: With a mix of serious and nonserious subplots. Do not get invested in the serious ones — without fail, they will swerve nonserious at the last minute.
- Haruhi-chan, a spin-off of Haruhi Suzumiya in which everyone is Super-Deformed, Ryoko Asakura, a former villain, has been rendered an ineffectual Butt-Monkey by regenerating herself at about half the size, and Yuki has picked up a dating sim habit. Everyone's quirks get turned up to eleven for maximum wacky hijinks.
- Hayate the Combat Butler: The first season of the anime, anyway - the second season and manga have continuity, and the latter has a few bouts of seriousness.
- Heaven's Design Team revolves about the hilarious antics the animal designers get into with as they try (and often fail) to come up with something that fulfill God's incredibly vague orders... or just create whatever random creatures that pops in their mind because they can. There's almost no continuity between the chapters/episodes.
- Honey Honey is about a young woman going to one country after another and encountering the local racial/national stereotype in a chase to save her cat from being butchered. The Final Boss of the series is King Kong himself.
- He Is My Master: More so in the manga, where the author inserts romantic comedy cliches, then chides the reader for expecting serious resolutions.
- Hetalia: Axis Powers is a parody of World History. While some strips does depict real world events, some is actually just the countries bickering with each other silly.
- Hi-sCoool! SeHa Girls: While the series has a serialized plot, it's more interested in being this.
- Jewelpet:
- Jewelpet Sunshine, set in a school attended by humans, Jewelpets, talking animals, normal animals and the odd robot. And the teacher is a Hot-Blooded pink dolphin. Hilarity ensues, though there is an underlying serious sub-plot.
- Jewelpet Kira☆Deco! is a parody of Sentai shows, with its members being exaggerations of Five-Man Band members, and there's NEETs for villains.
- Jewelpet Happiness is much like Sunshine, but with a less colorful cast.
- Kaginado: a crossover of various works by Key/Visual Arts where nothing is taken seriously, and even the saddest moments from the characters' respective stories tend to be Played for Laughs.
- Kill Me Baby: 99.9% of which is played for a purely comedic scenario where all seriousness and compassion are thrown out the window. And the manga becomes a Sadist Show as it goes on.
- Kodocha: The anime adaptation starts off as a humourous, fourth wall-breaking Romantic Comedy and Slice of Life that, while having its fair share of dead serious moments, is wackier than the manga and most other shojo series. Once we reach the back-to-back filler episodes from episodes 20 to 37, the plot mostly takes a backseat to amplify the jokes, the Slapstick and zany scenarios and occasionally dips into Bizarro Episode territory for the rest of its run.
- Lucky Star: The series follows the norm and is quite realistic for the most part but has its slight share of wackiness, especially in the anime.
- Negima!? (second season): The reboot is this, with most of the humorous banter between characters more characteristic of the Pani Poni Dash! writers than Akamatsu's usual fare. The original manga was like this for about 2 volumes before going in a different direction.
- Magical★Taruruto-kun: A gag manga centered around a hopeless elementary school boy and his magical friend. It's loaded with slapstick, Surreal Humor, and extremely perverted jokes that usually make even the most intense and serious moments hard to take seriously sometimes.
- Mashin Hero Wataru: A Strictly Formula Mecha series that has a nine-year-old boy Trapped in Another World with silly Super-Deformed inhabitants after summoning a spirit of a dragon god that resides within a clay robot he made at school one day. There's even a Greek Chorus whose primary job is to create scene transitions, always accompanied by a very polite but Engrishy "Ex-kyu-su~Mii~."
- Me & Roboco: The series is a banquet of gags concerning the misadventures of Bondo and his out of control OrderMaid, Roboco. As a celebration of all things Shounen Jump, it also features lots and lots of parodies of famous Weekly Jump manga.
- Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun: Since the series is an Affectionate Parody of shoujo manga and its making, most romantic or heartwarming moments will end up being ruined by one of the characters for the sake of a joke.
- My Bride is a Mermaid: Nagasumi and Sun's blossoming relationship is played semi-seriously. Pretty much everything else is comedy fodder.
- My Deer Friend Nokotan is about a former yankee delinquent who encounters a strange girl with deer antlers; said girl transfers to her school, claiming to be a human-deer hybrid and dragging her new friend into starting a "deer club", much to the latter's exasperation. Much Surreal Humor ensues.
- My Monster Secret: The series starts as a romance between a rather ordinary guy and a vampire girl… then all sorts of supernatural beings start to appear, whose degree of sanity ranges from silly to batshit insane. Most chapters feature an initially mundane situation that goes to hell thanks to that. The artist is notably prone to repeat panel layout between pages or using dramatic graphical effects in comical situations. The series becomes a little more plot-heavy in the post-92 chapters, but without letting go of the over-the-top absurdity.
- Nangoku Shonen Papuwa Kun: Primarily takes place on an island of extremely bizarre creatures. Among them a hermaphroditic snail and a fish with human legs wearing fishnet stockings.
- Nichijou: The series has very little in the way of continuity and much more in the way of over-the-top wackiness, including an eight-year-old girl who's built a robot teenager with cannons and sweets stashed away in every possible spot, a girl taking out a whole crowd of people (and a goat) to prevent anyone from seeing her yaoi manga manuscripts, and the principal suplexing a deer with only one witness.
- Ninja Nonsense: An ordinary high school girl reluctantly befriends a cute teenage ninja girl, both of whom are frequently relegated to being Fanservice for the perverted blob of a headmaster and his partially depraved loser ninja clan.
- Pani Poni Dash!: The series is a parody that centers on an 11-year old girl who becomes the homeroom teacher of an entire classroom of high school students with many of the joke centering around topical trends of the time.
- Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt: Combined with Quirky Work. The characters are all named off different types of underwear, and the show was made the creators were drunk, with the show inspired by the likes of Drawn Together and The Powerpuff Girls. The show is filled with incredibly surreal and Vulgar Humour with episodes having poo, vomit, semen and snot monsters. The English dub makes the whole show even more raunchy and over-the-top, and it includes more references and parodies of Western shows in the 1990s/2000s.
- The Ping-Pong Club: The series revolves around the absurd antics of a group of 8th graders and their goal to become the ultimate ping pong club.To put it simply, the series is widely considered to be Japan's answer to South Park with its insanely crude humor.
- Pokémon the Series: Most of the Filler episodes as well as the Pikachu shorts at the beginning of the movies.
- Pop Team Epic: The manga revolves two cute and jerky schoolgirls with lots of Surreal Humor and Non Sequitur. The anime adaptation ramps up the gags even further. Even another Bkub Okawa's manga, Hoshiiro Girldrop, is just a Bait-and-Switch gag for Pop Team Epic.
- Ranma ½ is a wacky series about the shenanigans caused by the increasingly ridiculous forms of Martial Arts and Crafts, Forced Transformation curses, and a hugely tangled Love Dodecahedron.
- Samurai High School: Almost everything that happens in the story is Played for Laughs, and any time a serious conflict arises, it rarely affects anyone too badly and gets resolved rather quickly. Despite this, there is the semi-serious main storyline about a brother and sister who (fittingly) crossdress as each other to attend the titular school. That being said, this premise is the cause of a lot of hilarity, as the universe itself is quite silly.
- Sgt. Frog: A wacky gag manga about a gang of frog-like aliens who constantly try to Take Over the World, only for hilarity to ensue instead.
- Sket Dance: From the former apprentice of the guy who unleashed Gintama onto the world, we have three high school students who will assist anyone with anything, usually with disastrously hilarious results.
- Splatoon has two manga adaptations that fall into this.
- The main Splatoon manga series follows Idiot Hero Goggles and his three friends who compete in the game series’ signature Turf War battles as Team Blue, usually winning their matches through the use of bizarre antics brought about by Goggles’ Invincible Incompetent nature.
- Splatoon: Squid Kids Comedy Show, as the title implies, is even more of this than the main manga, taking on a Yonkoma format, following its own Idiot Hero, Hit, who usually ends up attempting to perform a task in an absurd manner, much to the chagrin of his friend Maika.
- Strange+: the sordid tale of a 20-something year old who looks 12, likes to crossdress and get naked in public, and is in general a tremendous jerkass, his younger, saner brother, and their two co-workers - a violent woman and a possibly gay, dreadlocked, muscled guy.
- Tantei Opera Milky Holmes, where anything, even reality, is subject to change at a moment's notice.
- Teekyuu demolishes everything within its two-minute limit-sanity, its own bizarre rules and order, any semblance of a fourth wall, the limits of personal taste, how fast a normal human can logically speak (and how fast a viewer can read subtitles) to tell a joke.
- Umamusume: Peace Peace☆Supi Supi Golshi-chan is a Spin-Off Babies series based on Umamusume: Pretty Derby featuring Gold Ship as a kindergartner. Her Cloud Cuckoolander tendencies are cranked up several notches to the point she's a minor Reality Warper, dragging her class into one comedic mess into another such as alien invasions, Demonic Possession, and more.
Comic Books
- Ambush Bug in both its '80s and '00s incarnations. Every issue skips from place to place in The DCU, making fun of everything from Superman to The Sandman (1989).
- The original The Smurfs books; the Animated Adaptation, on the other hand, was more plot-based.
- Any series about Deadpool, usually of the Medium Awareness, Breaking the Fourth Wall, and Black Comedy with a dose of Refuge in Audacity.
- Red Ears is a popular series of Sex Comedy jokes.
- Idées Noires, Les Femmes en Blanc and Pierre Tombal are Black Comedy gags.
- Nearly everything under the Bamboo Édition imprint that isn't covered under their "Pouss' de Bamboo" or "Bamboo 2/Au Carré" collections, or a more serious series like Hallow. Even Ti-Zombi has its share of laughs (albeit filled with the Black Comedy kind).
- Mr. Crypt involves a living skeleton getting into all kinds of adventures like facing vampires and angry villagers with plenty of laughs.
- Dominic and Claire comics deal with the title characters in short vignettes loaded up with jokes.
- In the Sam & Max: Freelance Police story "Bad Day on the Moon", Max is briefly killed in a scene that is played seriously and dramatically. Hope you enjoyed it, because that one, solitary page is about the only time the comic takes itself even remotely seriously. Everything else (including how Max actually gets revived) is a constant stream of non-stop silliness, Black Comedy, absurd rambling dialogue, Random Events Plot, and delibrately nonsensical asspulls and Deus ex Machina that only stops whenever Steve Purcell runs out of jokes for the issue. The short-lived cartoon went even further with this, while the video games are generally more restrained, with the final Telltale season bordering on Dramedy at times.
- Herbie is a short, ugly, potbellied kid with no fashion sense. He's also stronger than Superman, indestructible, a master of hypnotism, and attracts women like crazy. He'll travel through time and space with nothing but a handful of lollipops and bop anyone who stands in his way. Anyone looking for a serious story here has clearly picked up the wrong comic.
Comic Strips
- Many Comic Strips or comics published in magazines tend to be gag series, because readers can laugh at the "joke of the day/week/month" even if they happened to miss an issue. Gag comics also tend to be popular with slow readers, because the stories are simple and have a direct pay-off once you've gotten past the page.
- Little Nemo typically featured a Dream Sequence which allowed all kinds of surreal storylines, only to end at the bottom of the page with Nemo falling out of his bed because it was All a Dream.
- Krazy Kat: All gags will end with Krazy Kat being zapped by one of Ignatz' bricks in one way or another.
- Max and Moritz, The Katzenjammer Kids, Sjors en Sjimmie, Perry and the Rinkydinks, Quick and Flupke, Billy Bunter, De Vrolijke Bengels, De Lustige Kapoentjes, The Bash Street Kids,... are all gag comics about the antics of misbehaving children versus their teachers, parents or a Meddlesome Patrolman.
- Peanuts, Garfield, Hägar the Horrible, Calvin and Hobbes, B.C., The Wizard of Id, Beetle Bailey, Piet Fluwijn en Bolleke, Robin Dubois, Léonard le Génie, Cubitus, Kid Paddle, Gaston Lagaffe, Idées Noires, Jan, Jans en de Kinderen, De Generaal, Haagse Harry, Le Chat, Kabout Wesley, L' Agent 212, Achille Talon, Le Petit Spirou, Titeuf, ... are all typical newspaper or magazine comics which work towards one punchline.
- Comic strips like Zippy the Pinhead and Cowboy Henk have more surreal storylines with set-ups and jokes that change in every episode.
- Gag cartoons (aka Gag strips, panel cartoons, or gag panels) refers to single frame comic strips in which the entirety of the joke/humor is contained in a single panel. Famous examples include "The Far Side", "The 5th Wave", and "Bizarro ". Editorial page cartons are also typically single-panel gaga cartoons.
Fan Works
- The DysFUNctional Pirates
- All three of the major fanfics on Poke Town
(The Pokémon Squad, The Looney Scientists Show and Seth in the Pokécity are this, with their constant dirty jokes and Black Comedy. It's quite apparent that Rayquaza Master, Lancelot Niccals and KalloFox34 don't want you to take their respective fanfics seriously.
Literature
- How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse, a parody depicting the usual Zombie Apocalypse scenario is essentially this, often taken to extremes.
- Nyaruko: Crawling with Love!, a hyperactive, Reference Overdosed parody of the Harem Genre in which a majority of the cast are the human forms of Cthulhu Mythos creatures (that Nyarko in the title? Short for Nyarlathotep). It tends to split its time between zany comedy and more serious moments, either gory battles with Cosmic Horrors or the emerging romance between the human Mahiro Yasaka and Nyarko.
- Student Council's Discretion is about the members of a private high school's student council and their meetings in the student council room, where they don't actually do much work and instead have humorous conversations while frequently parodying Otaku culture.
Live-Action TV
- Big Time Rush is basically a live-action series with cartoon plots (and sound effects to boot).
- Green Wing (a Gag Hospital Soap)
- Intralci is an italian series of comedic shorts born as a sketch in another comedic show. It's a demented parody of soap operas in which classic soap operas are stretched so much they becomes absurd. Soap opera's tendency to have everyone being related to each other here becomes a person being their own father and another being married to their mother. The plot's continuity is variable, as some deaths are permanent while others are not. The show also chooses Stylistic Suck, with the story full of plot holes, the opening song being blatantly off key, the acting extremely poor, actors being replaced at random and even a character's name being replaced because the writers were too lazy to correct the error.
- The Studio100 series Kabouter Plop while can be serious at times. Is mostly themed after slapstick humor.
- Le cœur a ses raisons (aka Sins of Love) is yet another shameless parody of soaps, this one being of French-Canadian origin.
- Let The Blood Run Free, an unrepentant parody of Australian soaps... from Australia. It makes Scrubs look like House. Observe.
- Monty Python's Flying Circus frequently berated itself for being too silly. Many of the sketches head deep into Cloudcuckoolander territory (one had a caption saying "SOMETHING SILLY'S GOING TO HAPPEN"), and the animations in between them are even weirder. The Sergeant with no sense of humor would generally serve as a means to tell them to stop being so silly.
- Mystery Science Theater 3000. Every episode is about a guy and some robots riffing a movie interluded with the same characters acting out wacky skits. Continuity is very loose.
- No Soap, Radio might look like a typical sitcom, but it's really an absurdist Sketch Comedy show in disguise. The hotel stuff is just an excuse to go from one gag to another.
- Sensualità a corte is an italian series of comedic shorts born as sketches inside another show that outlived it and was incorporated in other shows. A demented parody of soap operas, particularly of Elisa Di Rivombrosa, bends it almost non existent plot for the Rule of Funny, character always make stupid choices whenever possible and has shades of a Sadist Show since every character (not permanent) death is Played for Laughs, especially the protagonist's. It is also full of random things like characters suddenly speaking in another language, butchering their own language or advertising ridiculous products. It's also full of Anachronism Stew, as the show is set in the last decade of the XVII century yet things likes trucks, spaceships and deadly lasers also exists.
Radio
- Hello Cheeky was a series based almost entirely on quick jokes, with quite a bit of subtle strangeness and cartoon logic holding it together.
- The Goon Show was one of the premiere British surreal comedy shows, influencing everyone from Monty Python to The Beatles.
Video Games
- Crash Bandicoot was always a pretty lighthearted and silly series, but the games from Crash Twinsanity to Crash: Mind Over Mutant went into full zany by amping up the slapstick and Comedic Sociopathy, turning Cortex and many of the other villains into giant butt-monkeys, and having much more self-aware humor, including quite a few instances of Breaking the Fourth Wall. Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time dialled it back a fair amount and actually had higher stakes and some serious moments, though it's still definitely comedic.
- God Hand: There actually is a plot, but even the characters make fun of it. Also, there are midget Sentai and a gorilla in a luchador mask.
- Katamari Damacy: You are a young alien prince of some sort, doing the bidding of your father, the King of All Cosmos, by rolling up big balls of objects/animals/people on Earth, so that he can turn them into stars. Most everything in the game is there to be funny, and to get rolled up.
- Parodius: A parody of Gradius and other Konami games.
- Saints Row has slowly drifted into this. The first game was a dead-serious Grand Theft Auto clone; the second game decided to swing for the fences, and it's gotten increasingly bizarre ever since.
- WarioWare: The gameplay consists of a series of bizarre and humorous microgames that last less that 5 seconds most of the time and are completely unrelated to each other.
Visual Novels
- Dra+Koi shifts between being a gag series and some weird sort of romantic meta fiction without a moment's notice. It's hard to know what to take seriously.
Web Animation
- Homestar Runner, with its surrealist humour, wacky cast of characters, and countless inside jokes meaning all you need to make the most out of the series is a good sense of humour.
- The Demented Cartoon Movie! features barely any plot, no continuity between scenes, and features more than half of the 30-minute running time consisting of explosions. Suffice to say, the title is accurate.
- Don Hertzfeldt's Rejected. Not a series, but it fits. Seriously, try to create a plot from it. Your brain WILL explode.
- RWBY Chibi is a Gag Series spinoff of the original RWBY, meant to provide fans with some comic relief following the dark and dramatic turn of the third season of the original show and to get the animators acquainted with the new tools they'll need for Season 4.
- The asdfmovies are simply bout cramming as many jokes as possible into a few minutes. No plot, no continuity, and nothing too complex.
- The Lazer Collection is one big compilation of disjointed jokes revolving around the Imma Firin' Mah Lazer meme.
- SMG4 used to be like this during the classic era, before falling into the Cerebus Syndrome in 2018.
Webcomics
- See Gag-per-Day Webcomics for a list. A complete list would probably make the internet asplode.
- 8-Bit Theater is an example of a non gag-per-day strip that still qualifies. It follows a single, continuous story, but it's a completely surreal one that runs on Rule of Funny and Anti-Climax.
- The official Grand Blues web manga / comic of Granblue Fantasy which is accessible in-game counts as this, complete with many examples of Character Exaggeration, Affectionate Parody, and Lampshade Hanging. Notably, this series served as the basis for the 2017 April Fools event "Big Bad Shadow" - Grand Blues was stated to be an Alternate Universe from the main game, with the manga version of Vyrn featured as the raid boss.
- Learning with Manga! FGO and Fate/GUDAGUDA Order serve as this for their parent game. Like Grand Blues, they're treated as alternate universes from the main game (GUDAGUDA even more so due to its connection to Koha-Ace), and both had crossover events.
Western Animation
- Almost all classic cartoon shorts, particularly Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry, and the oeuvre of Tex Avery MGM Cartoons.
- And the later WB cartoons inspired by them, like Animaniacs, Tiny Toon Adventures, and Freakazoid!, since they were intended to be Spiritual Successors.
- Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog: A Denser and Wackier take on Sonic the Hedgehog that relies less on action and more on wacky, fast-paced, slapstick humor based on several of the classic cartoon series.
- Earlier episodes of Adventure Time tended to be this. Then Cerebus Syndrome kicked in.
- The Amazing World of Gumball, though like Adventure Time below, it would stop doing this as frequently as time went on.
- Captain Flamingo is a rather bizarre show to say the least. As if the premise of a young boy becoming a superhero for the little kids by using his joke novelty items to help with their needs isn't already weird enough, the show relies on fast-paced, campy humor, having weird or bizarre plots, a set of wacky characters, and most of the time, cramming as many jokes and humor as possible into each story.
- Chowder is filled to the brim with wacky, Surreal Humour with little to no breaks in between.
- Likewise, C.H. Greenblatt's other cartoon Harvey Beaks, though it's much more relaxed and less surreal than most.
- Ed, Edd n Eddy: Along with its extremely crude art style that becomes more unhinged between seasons, the writing can be simply described as a slew of gags (whether it be slapstick or fourth-wall-breaking humor) with a loose story tying them together for coherency.
- The Fairly OddParents! (especially later episodes).
- Family Guy is (in)famous for this. Later episodes of the show are often criticized for having its signature Cutaway Gags and Overly Long Gags as pointless filler.
- Filmation's Ghostbusters was, like the "Abbott and Costello Meet the Monsters" movies, a beginning, an ending, and a rapid-fire succession of jokes in between. The writers and artists who worked on the animated sequel regarded it as a gag series compared to the more serious He Man And The Masters Of The Universe.
- The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, which is a mix of dark humor and gross-out humor.
- Invader Zim is a very dark variant of this.
- Jimmy Two-Shoes's episode plots are often about cramming as many jokes as possible into ten minutes with a story built to link them up.
- Kaeloo has plots that switch halfway through the episode, one-off gags that have nothing to do with the rest of the plot of the episode, and barely any continuity between episodes. Sometimes, there isn't even continuity between scenes of the same episode. The main focus is humor.
- Scaredy Squirrel (2011). It relies on the same random humor as Yakkity Yak (see below).
- Secret Mountain Fort Awesome and its spin-off Uncle Grandpa take this to a new level.
- Sheep in the Big City features Sheep, who is hiding from a secret military organization. Why? General Specific has a sheep-powered ray gun. Gags happen as the military tries and fails to grab one Sheep. Apart from the plot, there are also Parody Commercials, and a segment with the Ranting Swede.
- The Simpsons tends to drift in and out of this. The first few seasons bordered on Dramedy territory, but as the show went on, particularly the David Mirkin episodes, the plotlines got progressively more over-the-top while the humor became far more surreal and cartoony. By Mike Scully's tenure as showrunner (seasons 9 - 12), there was a notable focus on comedy over plot.
- South Park, pre Bigger, Longer, and Uncut was based on this. The creators began to aim for more satire as they eventually realized the show would not be able to keep up the formula forever.
- SpongeBob SquarePants was always one, but later episodes take it further.
- The Super Hero Squad Show, a wacky, lighthearted spoof of the Marvel Universe.
- Teen Titans Go! is an Affectionate Parody of the original show as well as some other DC elements.
- Yakkity Yak is about a young yak dreaming to become a famous comedian. This premise alone is already wacky enough, but the other characters (including Yakkity's pineapple-headed best friend, his trilobite agent, and a Mad Scientist with Kaleidoscope Hair that lives in his basement with a Robot Girl) and plots are even moreso.
