It's tentacular!

In looking for a new short show to watch on Netflix, Husband and I started Squid Girl, a dubbed anime (it's also on Hulu). The show is about a squid-girl who calls herself the Emissary of the Sea and has come to land to invade humanity to punish them for polluting the oceans. The plots all tend to revolve around Squid Girl learning about humanity and the silly blunders that happen from her not understanding what is going on. They're fairly typical plots for this type of anime. The characters, too, are fairly typical and fall into the expected types. (Though I should add that I think some of what is "typical" is actually parody, but I'm not sure. It seems like some scenes are making fun of anime tropes.) So all in all, though ridiculously funny occasionally, it's not a particularly engaging show despite its premise. I'm only 5 or 6 episodes in, and they have been getting more interesting, but still, it seems like fairly average anime of the silly teen comedy variety.

But the puns! The puns are fabulous. Or should I say, tentacular and tentastic. In the English dubbed show, Squid Girl uses squid- and fish-based puns in every sentence. The original Japanese apparently does not have puns, but does give Squid Girl other silly verbal tics. The puns make up for all of the mediocrity elsewhere. The best puns are used for swearing, but there are also squid-word substitutions: Squid Girl says inkvasion instead of invasion, gilly or squidy instead of really, squidding for kidding, etc.

Some of my favorite:

What the squid?
What the gil?
What the kelp?

tentacular
tentastic

Back in a squirt
I can't believe you swam there!
Beats the squid out of me.
You've got to be squidding me!
I'll scare the kelp out of you.
They're all over the squidding place!
What in the name of all that's wet?
I better get kraken.

That's none of your kraken business!
I can't believe you kraken left me there!
That's kraken boring.
You wait just a kraken minute.
All of this kraken litter

Edited to add: So I watched an episode while eating lunch. The show is increasingly bizarre and is starting to use more sophisticated story-telling techniques, so I'm liking it more overall. But it is still not consistent.