Emma Chichester Clark's gloriously coloured illustrations and understated text play out the joke lightly, making No More Kissing! a refreshingly robust tale.
As someone who studies, teaches about, and speaks against racial injustices, I don't take racial jokes lightly.
Be VERY sure that the person you throw this at will take the joke lightly, because tomato sauce is very difficult to get out of some fabrics.
However, leaving aside intimidatory humor for the moment, if you're finding yourself unable to take any joke lightly but feel it's somehow a personal attack, aimed at you in some way, or is being funny at your expense, then you might be overreacting.
It's a helium performance, in which jokes land lightly, mugging is gentle, and songs are delivered with almost conversational casualness.
The basic idea is that you'll want to joke and lightly tease people you're attracted to, showing them special attention while simultaneously staying "hard to get".
Swinging lightly and joking his way through the 1966 hit that Frank Sinatra turned into a vocal punching bag, Mr. Wopat treated it as an offhanded sparring match between the urge to triumph and the impulse to throw in the towel.
"All the intelligent Cambodians either fled the Khmer Rouge or were killed by them," my Cambodian friend and fixer, Phin Chanda, once said to me, lightly, as if joking.
"When I say sports have saved my life, I'm not saying that as a joke or lightly," she told her hometown paper, the Salt Lake Tribune, recently.
Davis, not one much for jokes, bantered lightly for a moment, then walked a few tables over and sat down to field questions about what he would be saying on Tuesday night.
