Kyoto Animation holds a unique respect among anime fans, ever since exploding in popularity with massive hits in adaptations of "Haruhi Suzumiya" and "Clannad" in the mid-2000's. But aside from making effectively emotional stories and quality animation, they also have a surprising amount of variety in their catelog, one they have continued to keep even after their financial success. Their genres generally range from high-school romance, slice-of-life, action, and slapstick-comedy, with enough regularity that one might assume they had dedicated teams of storywriters switching every few seasons.But Kyoto Animation's 2011 comedy "Nichijou" was something special. It was originally licensed by Bandai Entertainment for a DVD release in North America, but the company went under shortly after the show's Japanese broadcast, so it seemed "Nichijou" would be lost in licensing hell and never in the hands of English consumers. Like most anime unlikely to receive a prompt legal release, individual clips of the show began being uploaded to Youtube, complete with high-quality fan-made English subtitles. Yes, this is illegal, but it was likely an important factor in Funimation's eventual 2017 Bluray release: before its license rescue was announced, these individual Youtube clips were reaching tens of millions of views. Even in the wake of mega-hits like Pokemon, One Piece and Naruto, I've never seen this kind of fervor.In the case of "Nichijou" (also translated with the English subtitle "My Ordinary Life"), it makes sense that individual clips would be so watchable. The show doesn't necessarily follow a strict storyline in each episode. It is comparable to old adaptations of American comics like "Peanuts" or "Garfield" for TV, where loosely connected jokes originally written in strip format play out. It's universal and accessible. All you need to know is that the recurring characters include a trio of high-school girls, and a second group of friends consisting of a child mad scientist, her girl-like robot creation, and a talking black cat. These and a large cast of secondary characters all have unique personalities that make them distinct, but their characterization isn't too important in the ridiculous setups they are put in. After seeing the show, I even went so far to purchase an English copy of the comic ("4-koma manga")... and while it has the same jokes and characters, it wasn't nearly as funny. So what did Kyoto Animation add to make the show so enjoyable to watch? The timing of watching a joke play out rather than reading it helps give more power to the joke as a whole rather than the punch line, I am certain this is part of why seeing "Nichijou" as an animation is so effective. But on top of that, Kyoto Animaton went out of their way to make the animtion look outstanding. The character designs match the simplistic manga, visually pleasent and distinctive from other anime with their large heads and rectangular limbs. But on top of that, when jokes carry out with intense excitement in the faces of the characters, the camera zooms all around, warping the environment, adding a higher frame-rate and detail to character movement, and adding speed-lines and particle effects to each step or punch. It can make the simplest scenes seem more exciting than the best action shows. 
One example joke is when the girls are eating lunch in their class: one is about to eat a piece of a hotdog with her chopsticks when it accidently slips from her grip. About to fall to the ground, the student tries multiple times to catch the food before it hits the ground. Its a simple premise, but in Kyoto's show, the second it slips, it falls in slow motion. The girl gasps, wide-eyed and focused, and like a trained ninja, preps to catch it. She misses at her first attempt, but it is knocked in the air to give her a second chance. Each time she tries, she misses, propelling the food piece across the classroom in slow motion around desks, students, and mohawk hair, her friends watching intently like it was a tennis match. Sure, the final punch line ("3 second rule!") is funny, but the exaggerated lead up being drawn out for so long and the sheer fun it is to watch that setup is what makes you fall on the ground laughing. "Nichijou" has dozens of great jokes like this, but while you are likely to laugh out loud at least once across each of the 26 episodes, not every minute is a sure hit. If you are continously waiting for the next great joke, it can seem a little tedious. But if you watch for the show itself rather than the jokes as seen on Youtube, I think you'll find you will grow attached to the characters and be able to watch them indefinitely. While the story might not win any awards in writing, it's creativity in the jokes and the character backgrounds help make you feel at home. One of the ending-credit animations is a slow camera pan showing a bird's eye view of the small town with all of the characters walking through its streets: even though I haven't seen all of the characters by the time the ending first played, I certainly have seen them at least once by the final episode, and watch the ending fondly as if I myself had lived there all my life. The visuals are great (as described previously), although some of the extreme-animated sequences can seem a bit too reliant on digital effects, making them seem dated even a few years after its original broadcast. But other flourishes, such as brief shots of the characters in a live-action picture of a Japanese town, still make it clear that the staff cared about this production and strived to make something better than average. There is no English dub, but the Japanese voices and their delivery are difficult to replace. The music varies from overly dramatic, unbeat, and simply ambient. The two opening themes are great toe-tappers, and when paired with the lyrics and animation, you will want to watch them every episode."Nichijou" manages to accomplish something that no other anime has done: it is a family-friendly comedy that is every bit as globally-universal and accessible as Charles Schulz's immortal "Peanuts" gang, while still maintaining the best visual quality available in modern television anime. It's rare to give such legitimate praise to a comedy, but afterall, "Nichijou" isn't my ordinary comedy.