The problem with The Daily Life of a Part-time Torturer is not that it’s too dark to be funny. It’s just not funny, period. The premise is half-baked, the characters aren’t goonish enough, and there’s nothing hyperbolic in the situations or the dialogue. The main joke of the show is that it juxtaposes all of the usual slice-of-life trimmings with the grotesque and simply leaves it at that. And even then, the grotesque is barely utilized. We see our leads torture some villainous criminals only some of the time (thankfully, all off-screen) before the majority of the anime turns into another workplace anime.

The good thing about the torture not being as big a thing as the title suggests is that it can’t overdo its shock value. I’m squeamish, so I guess I should be thankful for this; I mean, you don’t want things to become Saw and end up being too violent and distracting, right? But I didn’t expect the opposite to happen either. A typical episode will spend maybe just a few minutes in the torture room, and then devote the rest of it to nonchalantly discussing the business of torture, as well as getting into unnecessary workplace rivalries, ex-girlfriends, beach trips, haunted office spaces, and other Kafkaesque nonsense that adds nothing. Somehow, we barely feel any real sense of business being conducted. What could have been bloodcurdling and fucked up becomes boring.

Our cast of characters could have been made funny, if they had the right personality. These characters are torturers who look at their work no differently than any other 9-to-5er. That in and of itself is pretty absurd. But the characters don’t have absurd enough personalities to build from there. The one child Mike, for instance, joins the torture company bearing a catfaced smile that never leaves his face, hoping the job inspires him to write a novel. The anime could have exaggerated aspects of Mike’s youthful innocence with his bloodlust for great comedic effect, maybe create a Jekyll and Hyde situation, or maybe have him be like if Killua Zoldyck were in a black comedy. Maybe he gets so wowed by the torture that the innocence is wiped off of his
face and turned into something like Alex DeLarge from A Clockwork Orange; instead of saying “I was cured, alright,” he could say something to the effect of “hot damn, this will make a KILLER chapter for my new novel!” But Mike never becomes more than a cheerful youth unfazed by his duties. He lacks any real quirks, eccentricities, or flaws. Meanwhile, the company’s boss is a man who dresses in drag because….reasons. This is where the anime feels like it’s begging for laughs. “Dude looks like a lady! Laugh at that! Because we said so.” It also doesn’t help that the dialogue contains nothing punchy at all.

Because Part-Time Torturer banks only on its premise alone for yuks, as well as playing every sequence so archetypally slice of life, it lacks any sense of cleverness or playful irony. Consider the devilishly flamboyant characters of Helluva Boss, or the Gang from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. They represent the worst society has to offer, yet perform everything with a manic glee so contagious that they win us over anyway. In the anime world, similar can be said about Panty & Stocking‘s sinful, overindulgent lifestyles, as can the antagonistic misadventures of Pop Team Epic‘s Popuki and Pipimi. In no way am I a comedy expert, but I’d like to think that this style of humor is made possible not in the obscene subject matter itself, but due to clever writing, brilliant character chemistry, making the irony clear as day, and exaggerating every single detail possible. Part-Time Torturer simply does none of this. Its characters are dull, their eccentricities (if there are any) are not emphasized, and there’s nothing the script does to properly punch down at them. No hyperbole, no sarcasm, no goonery. I’ve seen sandpaper funnier and more coarse than these guys.

Not that the line of business really matters. One thing I noticed very quickly is that because the dialogue is so stale and everything quickly reverts to a run-of-the-mill office slice of life, what the characters talk about in their off-time can relate to any job. Meaning you can switch the professions around and have nothing change at all. Just to amuse myself, I pretended that the show revolved around a doughnut shop instead of torture, and substituted every instance of blood splattered across characters’ faces for strawberry jam. Hell, I even played a game of Mad Libs with the stale dialogue, because why not? The biggest instance comes right in episode four:

“You can’t just send the scumbags doughnuts we torture bake back into society the oven, right? It’s my job to deal with them. Face, body, title, status, connections Flour, sugar, filling, icing, sprinkles…there’s no part of a villain doughnut that can’t be used eaten.”

And then another in episode five:

“Not only do we give villains customers a taste of retribution doughnuts, but through the new information recipes we obtain, we destroy gain even more villains customers! Torture Doughnuts saves the good feeds the customers in the world, and its wonderful culture has such depth. It’s definitely worth studying!”

See what I mean?

There are other things that I found weird. Like how the show feels the need to share the same shot of a door slightly opened, as well as a cigarette ashtray? There’s also a moment when another character says that torture is “looked down upon in society,” yet not only do we never see a single person object to torture, BUT since torture is perfectly fine and legal in this world, doesn’t that imply that it’s normalized too? Also, is this show taking a pro-capital punishment stance? It’s okay that these guys torture people, so long as these people are villains? Or at least accused of villainy? Where do they draw the line? During the show’s very first torture sequence, our main character Sero has doubts as to whether or not the guy he’s torturing was actually involved in the crimes he’s accused of committing. Does that mean some people are falsely accused? What other flaws does this pro-capital punishment system have in store? It all seems too politically problematic for its own good. I’m not sure the anime thought this through.

Thankfully, this show is so boring that to be that offended by it is a waste of good energy. The music rings out like the same boring elevator music I’ve heard so many other anime use before. The art also lacks pizazz, and the animation is nothing to write home about. It’s bad enough the animation is so stale and non-expressive in the way a lot of other bad anime are. It’s made even worse when you realize the only way the animation could jump out at its audience is through giving more attention to its torture scenes. Not that showing graphic violence for a cheap attempt at shock value would sit well with me either—in fact, I would have dropped the show like a hot potato by episode two. But enough attention to detail would have at least given me enough to remember why I dropped it in the first place. Come a month from now, and I won’t remember a damn thing in Part-Time Torturer.