A man so thoroughly defeated by his own life that he's become a bystander in it. The comedy isn't about him winning or learning anything, it's about watching someone absorb blow after blow from a wife who treats him like furniture, a job that forgets he exists, a household that runs on his absence. This is what it looks like when a man has already given up, and the show finds something genuinely funny in the rubble of that surrender.

Damesuke Amano is a luckless office worker who gets pushed around at his job and fares even worse at home, where he has no say at all in how the household is run. His wife Onibaba is a towering, hot-tempered woman who scolds and even hits him and delights in making him miserable. His teenage daughter Yukiko and grade-school son Takobo often join her in tormenting him, both physically and mentally. The comedy flips the traditional Japanese picture of the father as head of the family, a reversal that made the original manga startling to readers in the early 1970s.