Powdered_Toast posted...
One of the things I found out while looking into this a few years ago is that Japanese comedians (or TV Talent, because they're also used for stuff like gameshows) are heavily controlled by talent agencies.
Comedians and "talent" (literally the English word converted to Japanese pronunciation
tarento
) are not the same thing.
Comedians, also called
warai geinin
or just
geinin
, have to come up through comedy talent agencies, with a whole bunch of rules and hoops to jump through, then work their asses off taking small gigs and developing their acts. If they're lucky, they get an appearance on prime time that blows up enough to make them celebrities and they use that to secure themselves a permanent slot hosting and/or appearing in TV shows.
"Talents" are people who are famous just for being famous. These days they mostly come from social media, but before that I think they were mostly models or entertainers with little success in their fields who were able to use their charisma to land spots on TV shows. Either that or some show that focuses on meeting and interviewing regular people would have some random person on who really popped, so producers would decide to give them spots on other TV shows. That's how it usually happened, although occasionally producers would even recruit random people off the street.
Anyway they're not the same but one thing that comedians and "talents" have in common is that they are frequently used as "filler" celebrities to round out panels and appear on game shows. There
is
a lot of overlap in what they do. You would definitely see both of them on shows like
Susunu! Denpa Shnen
back when they were popular.
That show was kind of the peak for a trend towards extreme physical comedy that had been going since the 80s. Comedians were basically expected to endure humiliation, grueling physical challenges, and even extreme pain in order to get a laugh. "Talents" were also expected to humiliate themselves and endure extreme, stressful situations. There actually was a public backlash to this show, specifically. That, combined with a lot of incidents where bullies would copy things on TV to torture other kids and injure them or drive them to suicide, made the studios gradually phase this kind of entertainment out throughout the 2000s.
Nowadays it still sucks to be a comedian or "talent" in Japan. You will work extreme hours for little pay unless you blow up really big, and endure a lot of humiliation. But the really dangerous and dehumanizing stuff is pretty much gone I think.