A vegan bushman plate is about as joyless as it sounds: giant mounds of jerk seitan, tasting a little like packing peanuts, with unadorned couscous and callaloo, a Caribbean leafy green.
Despite big brass interventions, the disjointed austerity of Stuart MacRae's 'Ancrene Wisse', a setting for soprano and orchestra of the thirteenth-century nuns' manual, also seemed typical of the way too much new British music is aping its dour, war-weary masters, as if it were almost obligatory to be joyless, full of sound and fury but signifying all too little.
There have been times when this allegiance was not necessarily for the best: the discordant relationship among the players was widely known in the music world, and too often over the last 20 years tensions in the group made its performances sound joyless and perfunctory.
In other words, it couldn't sound more joyless if it tried.
Post Malone, a singer and rapper tangentially connected to the SoundCloud community, rose to the top of the Hot 100 toward the end of 2017 with "rockstar," a song that makes success sound as joyless as possible.
Pick your spot carefully Delia Smith manages to make picnicking sound utterly joyless: "In French films," she writes in her Complete Cookery Course, "picnics are all about rivers and willow and punts.
Now this may sound rather joyless for a car movie, and indeed for the greatest car movie ever made, but the picture is so inventive, so austerely beautiful, so unexpected and, yes, so auto-centric, that it's a singular wonder.
Coming from older, wiser mouths, it just sounds wordy and joyless.
The evening passes by as a joyless succession of flat words, sounds and images that at best trigger memories of the vitality of the film that inspired it.
It is a badge of honour among hikers to have "bagged" all 284 Munros, which to the uninitiated, might sound like a joyless mountain slog.
And so he can, even if the triumphs over music like the "Mephisto Waltzes" have sounded somewhat grim and joyless.
