It all started with the mother laughing. Shuichi Takizawa remembers as a child he would sit in front of the TV with her in the cramped living room of the dingy apartment in Tokyo’s Adachi district and they would watch the comedy shows together. “Kaou meijin Gekijyo”, “The Televi-Engei”, which was current at the time, in the early 1980s. The unmaskingly funny Beat Takeshi aka Takeshi Kitano was there, but above all the breathlessly joking standup duos of the Japanese comedy genre Manzai ran. Sometimes he looked over at his mother. She was often angry. Because her father had driven his company into bankruptcy, she had to take on simple part-time jobs at home. Hard times. But the shows put her in a state of blissful hilarity. “She laughed to death, which I really liked,” says Shuichi Takizawa. And so the desire matured in him to become someone who makes people laugh.
From Comedian to Garbage Man: Shuichi Takizawa of the Manzei Duo – Culture
