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Controlled Karaoke: Saturday Night Live Makes Fun Of American Otaku, Makes Me Look Nervously Into The Mirror

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crtcgzOpplQ”]

UPDATE: OK, appears NBC is really good at getting video pulled off the Internet, as the original clip I posted is gone. You can see a clip of the below here and above is another YouTube clip bound to be removed in the near future. Strangely, though, it seems the YouTube comments for both follow a similar pattern.

OK, ragging on Saturday Night Live has become an especially easy sport in recent years…but I’m going to admit they had me cracking up with this sketch from last Saturday’s episode (which also featured Drake!). Titled “J-POP America Fun Time Now!,” the bit focuses on two Michigan State university students who love Japanese so much, they host a TV show about it. What follows may not be any groundbreaking humor for anyone using the Internet in the past 10 years, but for some reason I still enjoyed this way more than MacGruber. And hey, kinda educational, because the teacher is right when he says it is a narrow part of Japanese culture. Also the self-awareness of racism was pretty funny.

(Part of the reason I find this funny is because I also watched the web-only reality series America’s Greatest Otaku, which attempted to sorta clean up the image of the “otaku” but half the time sorta resembled the above sketch. Ya know, except without being intentional. If you’ve got a lot of free time, watch it for the laughs.)

Make sure to check out the YouTube comments while you are at it, and by that I mean stay the hell away from the YouTube comments. A combination of people offended by the portrayal (to the point they compare themselves to Italians getting offended by Jersey Shore) and the just-as-annoying folks going “I know these people in my Japanese class, so lame because I’m great.” Oh, and people saying the parody of J-Pop is still better than American pop music…the hell is wrong with these people? Oh yeah YouTube.

Shouts out to my mom for sending me this.