Comedy is a miraculous genre that can be a main genre of an anime, but it can also be a complimentary genre to every other genre out there – and still be just as good. However, comedy and sports are two genres that you don’t actually see together too often.
Many sports anime fans come for intense competitive sports action if not for the emotionally-rich character stories that are pervasive in the sports genre. They can enjoy the occasional joke, but it is not what draws them into sports anime.
However, if you enjoy sports anime and can appreciate the genre not taking itself quite so seriously sometimes, then these great sports comedy anime recommendations are for you.
Sports Comedy Anime
Haikyuu
Yes, if you are a sport anime fan, you’ve likely grown sick of seeing Haikyuu on EVERY. SINGLE. LIST. of sports anime. However, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t belong on this one.
Part of what made Haikyuu so wildly successful is that was a heady mix of high-adrenaline sports action that got the big bucks when it came to the animation budget. However, a not-small portion of Haikyuu’s likability also comes for the fact that it let its large cast of unique characters be silly, and it let them be silly frequently.
Some enjoy this volleyball anime for the spotlight it shined on volleyball. Some liked Haikyuu for the BL ships it set up for fans to spike into their fanfiction. And some liked Haikyuu because it made them laugh as much as it made them cry. All of that contributed into its wild, genre-breaking success.
Yowamushi Pedal
Like Haikyuu, Yowamushi Pedal is a popular sports anime that can attribute some of its success to how much it embraced injecting comedy into its sports story.
In fact, as Yowamushi Pedal is about cycling, a sport somehow even less appealing to a broad anime audience than volleyball, a goodly chunk of that success probably came from how dorky, eccentric, or delightfully maniacal about cycling many of its characters are, often organically creating its jokes from their own accentuated personalities.
Teekyuu
While Haikyuu and Yowamushi Pedal feature more sports action than specifically joke-focused comedy, Teekyuu is the exact opposite.
Across its 9 Seasons (of short-form, 2-minute episodes), you’d be hard pressed to watch this deranged tennis club of girls play actual tennis more than just a handful of times. It offers you a rapid-fire of jokes that hit more than they miss while being wrapped in that marketable moe art style.
Teekyuu is definitely for people who enjoy a more manic style of comedy because it does blast jokes at you at top speed. However, it is great fun and there is a lot of it to enjoy.
If you run out of Teekyuu, they also have a spin-off anime about a rival tennis team called Usakame, which pretty much just more Teekyuu, but with different girls.
Bamboo Blade
Bamboo Blade masquerades as a standard sports anime about a kendo club, and lures people in because there is only small handful of anime about traditional Japanese combat sports. However, what you get is not a serious sports anime.
Instead, you get a comedy that is about a bunch of girls convinced to practice kendo by the broke-ass broke coach who is trying to win free meals for a year by beating his senpai’s actually competent opposing kendo team.
Where this series really shines as a comedy is in its characters. The show takes pretty standard character archetypes and then just sort of mixes them up to create a cast of unique characters with flaws that you don’t traditionally see in those stereotypical characters.
You’ve seen plenty of “smart” characters who join a team, but Bamboo Club makes the nerdy girl actually kind of adorably dumb. You’ve seen those endearing klutzes that serve as the heart of the team, but Bamboo Blade makes her the unexpected taskmaster.
The character twists fuel the comedy and are what make this sports anime, which doesn’t take its plot very seriously at all, worth watching.
Go! Ina Junior High Ping-Pong Club
Ina Junior High Ping-Pong Club is an older comedy anime that just so happens to be about a sports club. As the title suggests, it follows the member of a ping-pong club where most of the members are comical degenerate outcasts that are unpopular with girls.
Similar to Teekyuu, Ina Junior High Ping-Pong Club is about the boys in a ping pong club that don’t play the sport too often, if at all. Instead, they make farts jokes and engage in a variety of perverted situations that always come back around to them being unpopular virgins.
While ecchi comedy isn’t for everyone, this series is very much “boy” comedy aimed at the young man. Think similar to Prison School or a raunchier The Daily Lives of High School Boys.
Oblivion Battery
As Japan’s favorite sport, anime tends to treat baseball sports anime with a different set of mitts. Baseball anime is, if not serious, then inspiring about scrappy young ball players aiming for Koshien.
While serious sports anime can also have a lot of levity, you usually go to baseball anime if you do want a serious sports action or at least some ponderous baseball-themed slice of life drama. However, Oblivion Battery breaks the mold.
Oblivion Battery presents itself as what could easily be a serious baseball anime about a genius battery split up after the catcher gets amnesia and stops playing. The series explores that serious-sounding plot too, but it does so surprisingly intermittently between nipple hair jokes and a main character that, even when he did play ball, comically whinged about how much he didn’t want to play ball.
While Oblivion Battery is a rehabilitation story, it is one that only takes breaks from being fun to show a few cool, Mappa-animated moments of baseball. Sporting jokes so bad they’re good and a compact cast of very likable characters, this is the sports comedy anime for people who love comedy, but also do want a little bit more of the characters playing the sport in there too.
Clean Freak Aoyama-kun
Clean Freak Aoyama-kun markets itself as a sports anime about a genius soccer player that also has a comical cleaning obsession. However, it quickly abandons most pretenses of being about soccer.
It’s it way, Clean Freak Aoyama-kun is a lot like Haven’t You Heard? I’m Sakamoto. Both series are about the pinnacles of human perfection as main characters, but in Clean Freak Aoyama-kun, he has the comical flaw of needing to see everything clean. While there are certainly messier sports than soccer, I think you can probably guess the focus of most jokes in the series given its premise.
While the series has less soccer play than some sport anime fans may like, it does mix in a lot of typical sports tropes into the plot and turns them into jokes. It also gets increasingly more epic with the jokes as it goes on, which makes up for some of its failings on the sports front.
LadySpo
Sometimes, you just have to watch badly-rated anime to see what went wrong there. Ladyspo is a series that sports an impressive 3.06 rating on MyAnimeList, a site where anything 6 and below is considered garbage by the masses. However, the question of what went wrong in LadySpo is immediately apparent. This series is a picture drama billed as an anime. A picture drama being voice actors acting out a story in front of still images with no animation.
So with that question solved, LadySpo is still a sports comedy, it just may not be an anime.
The series in question follows pro-sports bounty hunters who fight each other in various sporting events in ridiculous, comical ways. As the episodes are also about 4 minutes long, there really isn’t much more to say about it. It’s not good, but its a fine way to waste some time.
Grand Blue
Grand Blue is, in my opinion, barely a sports anime. It is partially because it is much more focused on comedy, but also perhaps because I don’t know if scuba diving is considered more of of a hobby or an actual sport.
However, it lives in the same space as a sports anime, and Grand Blue has a beloved reputation for its lovably degenerate comedy, so I’ll leave the ultimately judgment up to potential viewers.
Grand Blue follows a new college student who is swiftly dragged into a college diving club that operates at the dive shop of his uncle and classmate cousin. Therein, he finds what can best be described as your average college students – a bunch of young men and women that like drinking and being silly rather than being studious and responsible. It is the drunken shenanigans that drive many of the jokes throughout the series as Grand Blue does everything in its power to not get these characters in the water.
For awhile, anyway.
Grand Blue does loves its jokes and weird adventures, but it does take the moments of diving it has seriously. It even goes so far as to seemingly develop an actual plot, even if it does swiftly undercut every dramatic or touching moment with a joke.
Umisho High School Naked Swimming Club
Yeah, that is a very suspicious title.
While Umisho High School Naked Swimming Club starts very much as one of those “a normal kid joins a club full of weirdos” comedies, it dashes in some ecchi with the sudden appearance of a girl from Okinawa joining the club that has a peculiar habit of swimming naked.
However, like a goodly chunk of ecchi anime, that nudity is used for jokes and not really for actual titillation. Still, ecchi comedy is not everyone’s idea of comedy, and Umisho High School Naked Swimming Club is very much an ecchi comedy.
That said, it is also still a sport anime about swimming club. The main character wanted to learn to swim, and this new naked weirdo teaches him while also being quite a skilled swimmer herself.
Softenni
Softenni is a Cute Girls Doing Cute Sports Things anime in every sense. However, cute girls being cute does not always equate to comedy. However, Softenni does make the extra effort to not only make its characters marketably moe, but comically flawed enough to add that extra layer of comedic enjoyment.
While they only play actual soft tennis a handful of times throughout the series, you become endeared by the adorable character flaws that often fuel the comical situations and conversations that the characters engage in.
Rising Impact
While you could call Birdie Golf a sports comedy anime due to how fast, loose, and rediculious it makes the sport of golf, it does actually take itself seriously.
However, golf sports anime fans rejoice with Rising Impact because it does treat golf a bit more seriously, but doesn’t completely shun super powers. It also loves to take breaks from more serious sports moments for comedic events in tournaments or just allowing the young main character to be a goofy kid.
Furthermore, as Rising Impact was the very first manga series by the author of Seven Deadly Sins, you get to see the first iteration of many characters that would be used later in the Seven Deadly Sins fantasy setting.
Kinnikuman / Ultimate Muscle
Kinnikuman has been call a progenitor of the shounen genre, but it is, at its core, a sports anime. As a series that is part superhero parody and part pro-wrestling sports anime, Kinnikuman introduced us to the shounen action formula that would refined down to what we see today.
We got big, energetic fights, but also really profoundly dumb and wonderful humor about its meat-head characters. Also like shounen anime, you watch this series start off as the silliest comedy about a bad superhero finding out he is actually an alien prince and see it progressively transform into a more serious action sports anime over its very long run.
Do you have more sports anime whose comedy merits a mention? Let fans know in the comments section below.
