from UK book "'BEAT' TAKESHI KITANO" 1999

I have been a huge Beat Takeshi fan since the start of his career. I was at junior high school then. I used to listen to all of his midnight radio programmes. He did those for a decade, but I only ever missed a few. However, I have met him just once in person. It was six years ago, when I was working as an editor of a magazine. A colleague of mine was interviewing him and I tagged along. I remember Takeshi saying, "Owarai(Comic Performance) is like a never ending move." That was a theory of his which he brought up a lot. He would say things like, "If I talk badly about the Yakuza and they get angry and come after me, P11 just apologise and run off I'll say sorry and run. Or maybe 'Fuck!', then run." He'd also say, "Comic performers shouldn't take responsibility for what they have said and done." When you look closely at Takeshi's life, you find that it does reflect his theory, quite clearly in fact. It's just one continuous sequence of running away from everything, of never getting caught. The very first time he put that theory into practice was when he ran away from home. 

When Takeshi was working as an apprentice at France Theatre in Asakusa, shortly after he had dropped out of university, dreaming of becoming a comedian, Kiyoshi Kaneko (aka Jiro) suggested that the pair should do a manzai (stand up comedy) together. That was what eventually led to the formation of the The Two Beats manzai duo. Their stage names were Beat Takeshi and Beat Kiyoshi. They started out in strip joints and comedy theatres, then as they got more famous, moved on to larger halls. In 1976, they appeared on television for the first time and instantly became a social phenomenon. The reason was that the manzai that Takeshi spewed out was so different to the conventional manzai. His was much more risqu*. 

The subjects of Takeshi's manzai were a variety of socially vulnerable people such as the elderly, children, the disabled, the poor, the ugly, the stupid, even women. He cracked one gag after another about them. There is a famous quote from his Two Beats days which goes, "Make sure to firmly wring your parents' necks before you go to bed." It was a parody of a safety slogan by the fire brigade which originally went, "Make sure to firmly turn off the gas before you go to bed." In Japan at that time, the average life expectancy had grown and elderly people had begun to dominate the population. Domestic problems arose in every household from having to take care of elderly parents who might be bedridden or approaching senility. And so the tension between wives and their parents-in-law also grew. There were actual cases where parents were strangled by their son and his wife because young couples were so exhausted from endless caring. There was one instance where a wife stabbed her mother-in-law. That explains why the television centre which aired the show was bombarded with phone calls from viewers offended by what they saw as tasteless gags. The complaints persuaded the station to ban Takeshi from doing certain jokes and to edit the footage and take out any offensive dialogue. 
 

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