Although a "witty" musical passage that springs a surprise on the audience and cheats it of its expectations certainly has the emotion-relieving effect that tends to produce laughter, a concert audience may occasionally smirk but will hardly ever laugh: the emotions evoked by musical humour are of a subtler kind than those of the verbal and visual variety.
Sketch-based, it evokes with good humour the lives of his crazed colleagues and clientele, whose nightly revels terminate in violence and vice – never more so than when Merlin (a 70-year-old, bearded psychic) warns that in "four months and seventeen days" the manager, a coke-addled ex-model from Johannesburg, will die of gunshot wounds.
Its impossibly delicate balance of surreal humour and evoked beauty, knowledge, fearfulness, joy, and courage have never been bettered – I hope to read it again and again, summer after summer.
Their signature is to display the goods like discovered treasure, with each store having its own particular story to tell.The company that has designed the stores, Wonderwall of Tokyo, seems less concerned with selling expensive trainers than evoking an edgy form of humour, a sense of surprise, irony and ambiguity providing, in a sense, a venue for the brand's acutely observed hipness.
She's long been acknowledged as one of the UK's most intelligent performers, her small, pugnacious, vividly expressive body evoking a world of pain, humour and joy, yet her work exists in a hybrid world, of dance, confessional monologue and what she calls "cheap jokes".
And laughter is contagious, so once you evoke it through your sense of humour, it's likely to spread quickly.
He defended a project that many considered indefensible with good humour, a stance that evoked admiration and criticism in equal measure.
Couperus made use of new word-formations in evoking atmosphere and displayed a gently ironic humour and an extraordinary narrative skill.
The song evokes, in no particular order, fear, fervour, anger, humour, violence, and joy, not to mention countless homages and mimicry.
Malaysian comics scholar Muliyadi Muhamood commented that the humour in Lat's cartoons is evoked through graphical and textual means; "short, compact dialogues" and puns form the text while "facial expressions and actions" of the characters help to bring out the funny side of things.
