No over-cheerful teacher, no giggling classmates: whether one is 13 or 31, some things are best experienced alone before being tried with another.
Although he looks like sometime mentor Steven Spielberg, and wears a gaudy orange tie decorated with a string of lips, he also bubbles over with cheerful, guileless good humour as he spins one story after another.
Travelling alone, Clemency is handed over to the cheerful, plump Mrs Potchard, whose job it is "to ferry children around the world" for a reasonable fee.
Like the grooviest welcome mat I'd ever heard, a seductive wash of instrumentation took me over before Nile Rodgers' cheerful guitar line invaded my innards, and a robot voice entered the room.
We will die fighting," said Tijani, the vigilante leader, over the cheerful cries of two schoolgirls playing teyete, a local version of hopscotch outside.Since the bombings, he has had to turn away two grandfathers in their sixties who volunteered to join the vigilante squad.
The show starts with an innocuous-looking faux commercial for an insurance company, with a white family frolicking on its suburban lawn to the voice-over of its cheerful young paterfamilias; the company's slogan is "protecting a people and its property".
And the pair were cheerful over news reports of imminent rainstorms over Los Angeles.
Calvin Palmer (Ice Cube), the reluctant heir to his father's barbershop, cooks up improbable get-rich schemes in his basement and presides over a team of cheerful comic types.
"Megabubble!" intoned the largest and most cheerful of the boys, over and over.
Mr. Calvache eventually won the little girl over with his cheerful manner and easy smile, and he and Johana married.
Lubos Motl, an undergraduate physics student at Charles University in Prague, was not feeling very cheerful over the Christmas holidays in 1996.
