Fumihiko Takaba

Takaba stands tall, an adult man whose dark hair is cropped short and combed back, framed by long tapered sideburns that reach below his nose. Heavy brows sit above eyes with tiny pale pupils. In his working life as a comedian he favored a business suit finished with a checkered tie.

For the Culling Game he adopts the getup of the very first superhero that ever sent him into fits of laughter. The skin-tight costume is split right down the center: the left half is light blue with twin yellow stripes down the arm and leg, while the right half is simply gone, baring his chest and leg (a circular speech bubble reading "curse" conveniently covers the rest). A half of a yellow grinning heart marks the chest, and yellow smiley faces appear on both the white collar and belt, rounded out by red gloves and boots. During the closing stretch of his duel with Kenjaku, he wore a white burial kimono.

Takaba is a relentlessly silly man whose jokes routinely miss, yet entertaining people is the thing he lives for. His career flopped and life had beaten him down until a colleague told him to keep at it, reasoning that there is always room for comedians who are convinced they are funny. He took that advice to heart, channeling it into a wildly energetic, comedy-obsessed approach to everything. He is the lone person who finds himself amusing, cracking jokes even in dire moments to total silence, the exact flaw that sank his career, though he keeps thriving anyway. No matter how grave or tense the situation, he tries to turn it into fun, usually just exasperating everyone nearby.

The Culling Game left him entirely unbothered. Refusing to kill, he stepped in to help Megumi Fushiguro purely because the young man was being double-teamed, branding the attackers cowards and fighting at his side despite their opposite temperaments. Takaba claims he can read a person's good or evil nature off their face; he judged Megumi's face to be a bad one but helped him regardless, declaring that beauty is "revisionist." His comedic reflex never yields to the mood, irritating allies during Gojo's unsealing and confounding the Shinjuku raid planners who could not take him seriously.

His roots trace to a lonely childhood, when clowning around was how he made friends and got people to know him so he would not be alone. He never managed a professional comedy duo because he wanted his partner to treat comedy seriously, and he eventually walked away after taking it seriously himself, afraid of getting hurt. When Kenjaku told him he could never make everyone laugh, Takaba snapped back that he would make everyone else laugh instead, then immediately regretted it. Recalling who he truly was, he bowed in earnest apology to Kenjaku and vowed to make even him laugh, all in the middle of a fight for his life.

Takaba is deceptively powerful, and his score of zero in the Culling Game says nothing about his real capability. His clownish manner leads almost everyone to underestimate him badly. He describes himself as an old-school entertainer who is firmly pro-violence, and when his drive to entertain kicks in, his strength spikes dramatically. Reggie Star was caught off guard by that surge as Takaba swiftly overwhelmed Hazenoki, while Megumi, watching the same display, admitted he was glad not to be on the receiving end.

His unorthodox style troubled even Kenjaku. The Angel, an ancient sorcerer, urged that he be the one to confront Kenjaku, trusting in his technique. Takaba rendered Cursed Spirit Manipulation useless, and Kenjaku conceded that a thousand years of jujutsu knowledge could have amounted to nothing against him. As a master hand-to-hand combatant, he dropped Hazenoki with a perfectly timed surprise dropkick, parried and struck from behind, and chained into a punishing roundhouse, later slipping every punch after coating himself in ankake sauce through his technique. His cursed energy output flares high enough to put opponents on edge even when he only means to tell a joke, and his reinforced blows launched Hazenoki through entire buildings.

His innate technique, Comedian, turns anything he is fully convinced will be funny into reality. Its ceiling is high enough to challenge even Satoru Gojo, though Takaba remains oblivious to his own power. The technique conjures comedic scenarios that drag others into participation and even folds their thoughts back in as feedback, a form of soul resonance. It demands total, unshakable confidence to work; any crack in his belief shuts it down completely.