I can’t very well ignore a new show from Kyoto Animation. They don’t do very many and most are big hits. But I think they are getting in a rut. If you count both seasons of K-ON, this is their fourth adaptation of a gag manga about high school girls.

Nichijou (streaming on Crunchyroll as My Ordinary Life) is a bit different from its predecessors. As we would expect from Kyoto Animation, the animation is very good. Also it is a very funny show. Unfortunately, in the words of the notorious Saturday Night Live sketch, it’s not “funny-ha-ha”, it’s “funny-strange.”

The character designs are very reminiscent of Azumanga Daioh (the canonical gag manga about high school girls), but the tone is quite different. Azumanga based its humor on believable characters in mostly-believable situations, occasionally punctuated by surreal dream sequences. In Nichijou there is little need for dream sequences because everything is weird.

The main characters are three semi-normal girls and a robot. Mio (Mai Aizawa) is a slightly spacy blue-haired girl who seems to be the viewpoint character. Yuuko (Mariko Honda) resembles Azumanga‘s Tomo, though she isn’t quite as hyperactive. Mai (Misuzu Togashi) doesn’t say much but she’s apparently very smart.

Mio lives next door to the house of a mad scientist and her robot servant. “The Professor” (Hiromi Konno) looks and acts like a little girl–in fact she says that she is eight years old. Nano the robot (Shizuka Furuya) has a large wind-up key in her back and detachable limbs. She is constantly being surprised by the modifications that the Professor has made to her body.

The other characters are completely weird. There’s the rich boy who rides his pet goat to school, the tsundere girl who gets mad at him and pursues him with a bazooka, and inevitably a talking cat.

It’s probably not a good sign that the most likable, believable and human-seeming character is Nano the robot.