Japanese Mr. Bean?

Rowan Atkinson a.k.a Mr. Bean is one of the greatest comedians in the world.

I love his comedy. Especially, Johnny English series are my favourites.

As you know, Rowan Atkinson is a British comedian. That means, he speaks English.

However, you can enjoy his comedy even if you aren’t able to understand English well because the situation or his action looks funny.

Rowan reminds us a Japanese comedian. I guess most of us would have imagined him if we watch his films.

The most famous comedian in Japan, Ken Shimura

Have you heard of his name? It seems like Takeshi Kitano would be well known in the world compared to him. It would be mainly known as an actor or a director though.

Ken Shimura is an old comedian, I suppose there are no Japanese who haven’t watched his comedy.

He is already close to 70 years old, although he continues to perform comedy even now.

Why is he ‘Japanese Mr. Bean’?

He also has an iconic character

As same as Rowan is known as Mr. Bean, Ken Shimura is known as ‘Bakatono’ (The idiot feudal lord). Well, I don’t like it very much to be honest. Search for the videos by yourself if you are interested in. (By the way, the shadow shape of the featured image in this post is Bakatono.)

The situation is important.

I’d rather like to recommend videos like the following.

In Japan, such comedy is slightly uncommon nowadays. Manzai (something like stand-up comedy by 2 persons) and so on would be rather common.

I guess it would be pretty easy to make funny stuff with such a style compared to Ken Shimura’s comedy, that’s the reason why his style would be uncommon now.

They don’t need any words to make people smile

If you search for ‘Mr. Bean’ in google images you can see funny photos. Please search for ‘バカ殿’ in google images as well. It would probably make you smile too.

Please remember

I’m not going to compare if which one is better. (I rather prefer Rowan Atkinson.)

I guess Ken Shimura isn’t known in the world but I would say he is the most famous comedian and also an iconic comedian in Japan. It would be close to the impression towards Rowan in the UK.

Ok, that’s all today.