Asumanga Daioh: the Manga #1
by Asuma Kiyohiko
Azumanga Daioh is a comic strip (there's also an anime series) about a group of High School girls and their teachers. That's right, it's an actual four-panel gag strip--though the panels are laid out vertically--and I laughed out loud while reading it almost as many times as when reading Matt Feazell's Ert, or Murray Ball's Footrot Flats. That's pretty darn funny, by my standards.
It's mostly a comedy of square pegs in round holes, or to use a Japanese metaphor, the nail that stands up getting hammered flat. Sakaki is tall and elegant, so even though other girls admire her, they treat her as if she were regal and above them--and she's too shy to make it clear that what she would like is to pal around and play with kittens; Ayumu is from Osaka, so that becomes her nickname, and she ends up talking with the accent the region is famous for even though she speaks perfectly standard Japanese; Chiyo is a ten-year old genius who's in High School because she skipped grades, and the gags about her play on the cognitive dissonance this causes in most of the adults who encounter her (e.g. the lunch-room ladies decide that she must be undernourished to be so short in High School, so pile her plate with mountains of food). And so on.
You can see some of the fan-translated strips posted to the web at Azumanga-Toons. The professionally translated ones are a bit less literal, but I think punchier.