The 50 Best Comedy Anime of All Time, Ranked (2026)
Last updated: 2026-05-03 · Entries are ranked by MyAnimeList community score, pulled once and cached so the list stays stable between manual refreshes. Each season is treated as its own entry, matching MAL's catalog. Top-10 blurbs are written by the Anime Facts 101 team and reflect editorial perspective, not raw score order. Last refreshed 2026-05-03. Score data sourced from MyAnimeList community ratings via the Jikan API.
Comedy anime covers enormous tonal ground — from gag-per-minute absurdist marathons to dry wit delivered over slow cups of tea. What the best entries share is timing: a sense of exactly when to hold a beat, when to cut away, and when to let a running joke pay off several episodes after you've almost forgotten it.
Good anime comedy also tends to have good characters underneath it. The funniest moments in the genre usually arrive because you understand the person well enough to see the joke coming from a mile away and still laugh when it lands. Shows that treat their comedy as a mask for genuine emotional investment tend to top community rankings in the long run.
This list is ranked by MyAnimeList community score across every comedy-tagged anime on the site, with editorial blurbs on the top 10 explaining why each one earns its spot. Gintama dominates the top of this list by a significant margin — each of its seasons and films is treated as a separate entry, matching how MAL catalogs them.
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Gintama: The Very Final
2021 · 1 ep · Score: 9.05
Gintama: The Very Final is a film that had to land a comedic goodbye and an emotional series finale at the same time — and it pulls off both. Its 9.05 score reflects a community that had spent years with these characters and felt the sendoff honored everything the series built. The final act is Gintama at its most earnest, which hits harder specifically because the show spent years being absurd.
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Gintama Season 4
2015 · 51 eps · Score: 9.05
Gintama Season 4 earns its 9.05 by being the season where the long-running joke infrastructure pays off in action and emotion in equal measure. The Shogun Assassination arc is where Gintama stopped pretending it wasn't also a serious show, and the comedy still fires throughout. Longtime fans consider this the apex of the TV run.
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Gintama: Enchousen
2012 · 13 eps · Score: 9.02
Gintama: Enchousen scores 9.02 in a shorter cour that swings between some of the franchise's funniest standalone episodes and the setup for darker arcs to come. If you want to show someone a single season that captures what Gintama can do with a single episode's worth of space, this is the place to start.
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Gintama Season 2
2011 · 51 eps · Score: 9.02
Gintama Season 2 is where the show found its voice — the parody engine was fully calibrated, the character dynamics were locked in, and the transitions between comedy and drama became seamless rather than jarring. Its 9.02 score from an enormous community confirms that this is when the series became something genuinely special.
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Gintama Season 5
2017 · 12 eps · Score: 8.98
Gintama Season 5 earns its 8.98 as a tightly packed cour that handles the Silver Soul arc setup while still making room for the kind of gags that made the show famous. At this point the audience knew exactly what they were getting, and the show delivered it at the highest level.
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Kaguya-sama: Love is War -Ultra Romantic-
2022 · 13 eps · Score: 8.96
Kaguya-sama: Ultra Romantic scores 8.96 and stands as the best non-Gintama entry on this list, with a comedic style built entirely on dramatic irony. Both leads are brilliant, both are too proud to confess, and watching them engineer elaborate schemes that inevitably backfire never gets old. The Chika dance remains one of the most re-watched comedy sequences in recent anime history.
- 7
Gintama
2006 · 201 eps · Score: 8.93
The original Gintama series (8.93, 201 episodes) is where it all began — a slow-building comedy set in an alternate-history Edo where samurai are obsolete. The first several dozen episodes are deliberately low-stakes parody, which is exactly why what comes later hits so much harder. Committing to the full run is one of the better decisions you can make as an anime fan.
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Gintama: The Movie: The Final Chapter: Be Forever Yorozuya
2013 · 1 ep · Score: 8.89
Gintama: The Movie: The Final Chapter: Be Forever Yorozuya scores 8.89 and exists as a love letter to the franchise packaged as a time-travel romp. The movie plays with its own premise in ways only a series confident in its audience can pull off. It's funnier knowing the lore but structured to work as a standalone.
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Gintama. Silver Soul Arc - Second Half War
2018 · 14 eps · Score: 8.88
Gintama. Silver Soul Arc - Second Half War earns 8.88 by being the point where all the comedy the series had accumulated became a foundation for an emotionally overwhelming final battle. The jokes are still there but they land differently now — the show knows you know these people, and it uses that.
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Owarimonogatari Second Season
2017 · 7 eps · Score: 8.86
Owarimonogatari Second Season scores 8.86 as a Monogatari entry that wraps Araragi's arc with unusual directness while keeping the franchise's signature verbal wit fully intact. It is one of the more emotionally satisfying finales in a series known for leaving threads open, and the comedy cuts sharper than usual because the stakes are real.
