Japanese game shows bring the joy you didn’t know you needed

All of this is to say that none of us needs a reason to seek joy and feed our amusement, and this alone handily explains the popularity of Japanese game shows on JoySauce TV: Endless Pranks (2018) and G Wars (2011). Of the two, the latter better fits the image conjured by the “game show” appellation. Imagine a domino run in which each piece is twice the height of the average adult male. Now imagine two competing teams sending a player apiece to the end of the run. One has to push the dominos over and the other has to outrun them. Or picture this instead: two participants facing off with one another in a literal footrace over water at the Yokohama International Swimming Pool, in which both parties make a mad dash across flimsy mats bobbing upon the pool’s surface. Insanity? Perhaps. Entertaining? Oh, yes indeed.

Endless Pranks, meanwhile, bears a stronger family resemblance to American series like Impractical Jokers and Punk’d, on which the object of the exercise is to make unsuspecting targets look like schlemiels on television. What if that innocuous trompe-l'œil hole in the ground was, in fact, an actual hole? What if you were surreptitiously directed to hop into it? You’d feel pretty silly, that’s what—and the rest of us would laugh, secure in knowing we’d never be fooled by such an obvious gag (though we would, of course). It’s enough to entice one into making a trip to the Nasu Trick Art Museum, provided assurances that at no point will its collection of optical illusions turn out to be more than two dimensional.

In "Endless Pranks," a bodybuilder's towel was stolen, and his locker was bolted shut at a bathhouse.

JoySauce TV

Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you will weep alone. It’s easy to have a giggle at folks’ misfortunes in Endless Pranks—thank you, schaudenfreude—just as it’s easy to cheer on dudes engaged in the age-old dude pastime of “nitwitted athletic contests just for the hell of it.” Maybe the second of these is easier. If there’s a lesson to be learned from the 2026 World Cup, it’s that across all cultures and continents, people love rooting for sports teams. But everyone also loves a good pratfall, even in these most unfortunate of times. So while it is perhaps more virtuous to support your favorite soccer club than it is to point and cackle at hapless victims of public practical jokes, there’s also no harm done in doing so—not a victimless crime, but certainly an innocent one. 

We need a chuckle. We need things to celebrate. One can argue that there’s less merit to a show like G Wars—on which competitions are taken seriously while simultaneously being fundamentally unserious compared to the World Cup, one of the most impressive and visible events in the sporting world. It’s a quadrennial occasion. We don’t have many of those, especially here in the United States, where the World Series and the Super Bowl take place in the same seasons every year. They don’t feel special, and never have. Rather, they feel obligatory. There’s little that obligated us to care about the World Cup either, besides it taking place on our doorstep. There is even less that obligates viewers to watch G Wars. But that, perhaps, is the beauty of the show, and of Endless Pranks, too. They’re fluff, and no matter how high minded our tastes rise as individuals, fluff is always welcome.

In "G Wars," Rubber Band Wrestling has two competitors balancing on elastic bands above a pool of water.

JoySauce TV

Honestly, more than that, it’s necessary. A pop culture diet should be vast and diverse. We should seek movies and television that tune up our brains, give us a window into the human condition, whether ours or that of people far removed from our own experience. But a pop culture diet should also make room for fun, the same way an actual diet leaves room for sweet treats. What is life without fun—the unadulterated kind people get up to for its own sake? Watching an arthouse movie is fun, or it can be. Watching grown men hoof it past colossal tumbling dominos, however, is definitionally fun. The entire point of G Wars, and Endless Pranks, is to engineer delight in their audience. Call that bread and circuses, if you like, but reasons to smile and take in joy are few and far between at this moment in time. Any show that gives those reasons is engaged in a noble pursuit.