The store models often wear glasses, and unlikely colours and fabrics are mixed with a screwball comedy wit.
But it is also an apt emblem for Joy Williams's brief and brilliant stories, which lavish gifts of comedy, wit, and rich language on their fictional humans, and then abandon them, bereft and friendless, to a cold world, "accounted as nothing".
From ancient Greece until the 20th century, the vast majority of philosophical comments on laughter and humor focused on scornful or mocking laughter, or on laughter that overpowers people, rather than on comedy, wit, or joking.
We limited our search to "laugh$," and did not explicitly seek cacchinations, cackles, chortles, chuckles, giggles, grins, guffaws, smiles, smirks, sneers, sniggers, teehees, or titters; we also ignored sources of laughter (comedy, drollery, humour, jest, jocularity, whimsy, wit, and wisecracks).
There is comedy and wit and all the techniques of postmodernism, from parody and pastiche to high-absurdist irony.
Throw in a big dash of John Pizzarelli's playfully goofy humor (Wednesday's show included a hilarious monologue about a song featured in a vintage Bugs Bunny cartoon) and you also have smart, improvisational comedy whose wit nearly matches the music's saucy bravado.
Instead, the comedy, short on wit, follows the formula of its presumed target.
It's a balance of physical comedy and atmospheric wit that's nearly impossible to replicate, but one that Chow repeatedly pulls off in his best films.
Cartoons are used today primarily for conveying political commentary and editorial opinion in newspapers and for social comedy and visual wit in magazines.
Mister Roberts is Sayle's fifth work of prose fiction and it has the best qualities the man himself exudes in his comedy work: brains, wit and welcome absurdity.
"If movies hadn't changed so radically, what Mike would have been, perhaps should have been," Jules Feiffer says, "is the successor to a director like George Cukor — working in romantic comedy with urbane wit and style.
