I didn't personally like the Imagin much at all, so it made the show pretty mind numbing. Except Deneb, love that guy. The humor fell flat for me about 90% of the time, which is really surprising since the sense of humor in Kamen Rider shows usually works for me! Then again, TV-Nihon subtitles aren't exactly the best at conveying jokes.

You've gotten a lot of very conflicting responses to this question already, many of which aren't entirely correct, so forgive me in advance if I make my own mistakes while throwing my own attempt on the pile.

The key points here:

- yes, it is a pun, based on aru and nai having opposing meanings.
- it is *also* a completely normal sentence even if you completely disregard the pun.

The thing I think the other responses here have missed is how critical that to at the end is. I can't at all explain this academically since I didn't learn Japanese from a class, but basically, it's like a conjunction linking to an implied back half of the sentence. If you had a sentence like "アルトじゃないと_____", it would be translated along the lines of "If it's not Aruto, ____", so it's like saying "Nobody but Aruto could (tell a joke this funny!)", more or less. Therefore, Over-Time's "That's how you know it's Aruto!", TV-Nihon's "Gotta have Aruto!", and Shout's "That was a work of Aruto!" all actually get fairly close to the proper meaning of the phrase. It is very much Aruto's way of making it known how one of a kind his sense of humor is.

I feel like I'm probably making this sound more elaborate than it is with my poor explanation, but basically, there are a ton of ways to end a sentence in Japanese like that to convey the meaning of something that *has* to be, or *must* be done or whatever. If I wanted to say "I have to study", for example, I could say "勉強しないと", (benkyou shinai to). And maybe if I did study, I'd be conveying this way better!:p

Hopefully this helped!

And that's why he's a failed comedian.
When you need a thesaurus to understand his catchphrase.

This was somehow even funnier than all of his jokes.

It basically is.

I read the explanation a few years ago, so I'm probably missing some details, but Aruto's jokes are all word play gags like that. It's a specific form of Japanese stand-up comedy that is incredibly out of date now. The Western equivalent would be if he was doing a bunch of old "Take my wife... please" style shtick.

The hyper battle DVD touches on this, too. Aruto felt like he was behind the times and lost a comedy partner due to varying tastes in their work. For a HBD, it sure gives some neat characterization to the other career Aruto wanted to pursue.

Just for balance I feel like I should say that personally it was more just that I found Ryotaro really annoying to watch, but that seems to be an uncommon view lol.

Hey so I remember that one of the star gate writers said writing 26 episodes by themself was a hellish experience. This makes me wonder how the hell do some toku writers write 48+ episodes a year? Like do they have less editorial stuff to go through? More support? Are they just more used to crunch? Any ideas or info?

I have two words for you: filler episodes.

Yeah and in a way I don't mind sitting through a filler sometimes. I'm used to UK shows rarely making more than 6 episodes a year with only soaps, Casualty/Holby City and news/factual stuff being the kind of thing that runs close to a year because I'm presuming that there isn't the kind of money in UK TV that the US or Japan has and even 26 or so is still relatively self-contained compared to a year! So in a way a year-long programme can seem exciting to me. Sorry if that's more than you wanted to know but I have a lot of interests these days!