Spoiler Warning

I'm someone who is often drawn to things that have dark comedy, so when a friend recommended this I added it the list. Let me also state before we get into this proper, this review is solely based on the first season, as of right now I'm not sure if I'll be reviewing the others or not. Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei or "Goodbye Mr. Despair" is one of the most interesting and unique anime viewing experiences I've had over the years, granted I consider myself to be a "filthy casual", or "normie" when it comes to anime.

I'm going to give my best attempt at giving a brief summary, and the delve a little deeper into some aspects of the some like genres and tags for lack of a better term.

Story

Nozomu Itoshiki is a high school teacher who is pessimistic and paranoid, but not jut a little, like over the top He is also in constant "Despair" and is constantly trying to un-alive himself although its not always intended to be serious. He teaches a group of students that all have mental, emotional or physical health issues. Some others also have fetishes or insecurities.

The Main genre for this is comedy, and even though this is technically true, it has various sub-genres of comedy, such as satire, parody and surreal humor. The satire portion is done almost too well, in the sense where it honestly could almost be a social commentary. There are also a TON of references, to anime, celebrates and Japanese culture. And here, in my opinion is where it tends to lose me a bit, its mainly episodic in nature, playing off of both Nozomu and his students problems to be the main focus of most of the episodes. For a third of its episodes, I found a lot of it to be hilarious, then unfortunately it started it wane on me as the episodes would end up becoming quite formulaic. The surreal humor bits just didn't really grab me, I understand they strived to have a deeper meaning, but when they would occur out of nowhere in an episode, I would just get confused and it would lose me completely.

Characters

One of the gags in itself is that characters names, when spelled in kanji in a horizontal line, are a play on words for their actual name. Most of the time the students are one note jokes constantly being whatever their one trait is but times 1000. Nozomu is the standout with the most development which makes sense considering hes the MC. There is one moment in particular when lecturing the class about how mistakes can be found everywhere in life, he claims that one of his biggest ones, was teaching the same class. He says this specifically because he considers himself a failure for only trying to instill despair in their lives.

Visuals and Audio

I put these two categories together, mainly because I feel they fit so well together, and really elevate the series to a higher quality. The animation is a solid quality that changes depending on a certain gag, or slapstick humor that came into play and these are very strong elements. There is quite a bit of text in the backgrounds that fly by which can be jarring, some of which reference things which clearly weren't meant for a western audience, while others had a ton of anime and manga references. The editing also is a plus, as it matches the chaotic nature of the series and helps play up the comedy.

The voice acting in this is stellar, I honestly feel that the cadence and ways the lines are delivered make a lot of these jokes land way harder than they normally would. Not to mention the OP and ED and had some strong lyrical and and visual symbolisms

Overall
I really enjoyed the comedy in the first half, everything was landing, by the second the formulaic and episodic approach was slowly draining my enthusiasm, but do to the solid voice acting and editing work It still managed to get some chuckles form me throughout. Nomzomu is a highlight which by the way I just realized he's the same VA for Levi which is pretty dope. I wanted to like the other characters more, but they become one note very quick and I start to lose track as we get introduced to more.