Takasugi & Letting People In
This is mostly half-formed at the moment, but I was just having thoughts about how I appreciate the way Sorachi wrote Takasugi. He clearly handled this character with a great deal of care - and I see that most in the way he tells us about Takasugi via the series' humour.
Gintama's gags & humour breathe the 'life' into the characters - it's the characters' 'light on the surface when you break up through the dark ocean' & whole things can be written on the way Gintama uses humour and how Sorachi ties it in with Living alone.
I think I read on someone's post once (wish I could find it again) that to be part of the humour in Gintama is for the character to be 'present' and 'alive'. To let loose and laugh is to 'connect'.
Everything from the enraged 'tsukkomi' to the fantastical and absurd physical comedy, narratively, is the characters being able to exist beyond the trappings of their pain, of their angst and 'tragic backstory'. Every time, A First Breath after The Dark.
Sometimes we readers get that recontextualized for us after the fact with reveals and whatnot - but I remember noting before that Gintama itself seems to purposefully drop a reality-bending gag before things get too heavy, and it serves the experience of the story well, because overall the gags spare us from being suffocated when things get too heavy.
So characters like Takasugi and Shouyou - whose motives and inner turmoils are purposefully kept mostly under wraps for over a decade in real time - are interesting exceptions. (Gintoki also falls into this sorta).
Shouyou's jokes and gags happen in flashbacks, mostly via Gintoki, who embodies his 'soul'.
For Takasugi in particular, most of his gags pre-Big Reveal only ever happen 'by proxy'.
Sorachi is very careful that the readers never see Takasugi himself as part of a joke or gag until he has peeled back the membrane on Takasugi's pain to us. Until then, the absence is rather stark.
And even then, I think it's telling who Takasugi interacts in gags with - Gintoki, Katsura, Sakamoto - primarily characters from his past, from the war and his specific pain that he cannot let go of.
He doesn't have gags with the characters of his 'present', with those that live on into the 'future' - important to him as they are, Matako, Bansai and Takechi are the ones participating in the Kiheitai gags; like I said, Takasugi is only ever 'there' in their humour by proxy.
He's not 'silly' with them, we don't see him share what he finds funny (this is not just with the Kiheitai though, Takasugi especially post-war barely smiles at all in the context of a joke), the full breadth of his emotions are not shared.
Sometimes, I think the Kiheitai act out their gags and go so far as to dress up as him because that's how they keep Takasugi, who lives in the past, 'alive' - them trying to keep him with them 'in the present'. He is a ghost-man they carry with them.
(And then like Utsuro was a karmic debt hanging over man, a shadow of the eras of their own making, there's Altana baby. Which ties into the whole 'the times they are a-changing' and 'inter-generational stuff' going on in Gintama too.)
But Sorachi doesn't outright say this - he paints this picture with the way he picks and chooses who and what he does gags with and how. Like showing us a shape by using negative space.
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