It's a deadpan comedy about schoolgirls who work at a maid cafe. It's usually realistic, but towards the end it starts introducing time travellers, aliens, the afterlife, etc. (Did the manga-ka get bored, or was he running short of ideas?) I don't think I'll ever rewatch it, but it's okay. The opening and closing title sequences are both fun.
The heroine is Hotori Arashiyama, who's rubbish at most things but has plenty of enthusiasm. (At one point, she decides that she fancies her maths teacher, even though he thinks she's a monster sent to erode his sanity. She's even worse at maths than she is at everything else.) There's a boy (Sanada) who fancies Hotori and a girl (Tatsuno) who fancies Sanada. It doesn't matter that Tatsuno is far more attractive than Hotori. Crushes are all hopeless and doomed.
The art's straightforward, but more varied than it looks. Every significant character has a distinct look and build, partly helped by the fact that three of the female characters are like men in drag. (One of them is pretty in a boyish way, one is an old bat and the third is a schoolgirl with front teeth you could use to prise wheels off cars.) Also, the animation's by Studio Shaft, so there are some wacky art justapositions and striking camera angles, even in what might otherwise be completely mundane episodes.
There's no plot, really. It's just lots of random incidents. I have no objection to the show at all, but it's not very marathonable and I'd find myself pausing and doing something else if I tried to watch back-to-back episodes.
Is it funny? Maybe, a bit. Sometimes it tells little stories that are cool, e.g. the ep.9 pre-credits sequence about a woman who keeps selling her husband's vase to a second-hand store only for him to buy it back. Sometimes it's amusing. Sometimes I was watching mostly because "I've started, so I'll finish". The cast are reasonably well done and I liked them. I loved the crazy theory being true at the end of ep.9. There are funnier anime comedies, but there's nothing wrong with this one.
