Foulds has a certain amount of fun writing against the genre expectations of gangster fiction, but he also works through some of the more serious themes that underpinned The Broken Word in terms of violence and trauma, "and the chaotic weather systems of great events that sweep people up, and how you then put the world back together, or at least start to, after those experiences".
But comical though it is, his fiction is rarely frivolous, and one of its most serious themes is that the pursuit of pleasure — of satisfaction — is an ethical concern, a matter, as the Oxford poem has it, of good and bad.
Another major theme that appeared repeatedly across the sample was that transportation costs forced participants into having to make serious sacrifices in other essential arenas.
She asked Willems how he communicates serious themes in books that are funny, charming, and often only a hundred words long.
Bennani, who grew up in Morocco, is a master when it comes to merging serious themes with tropes that speak to the zeitgeist, but unlike so much self-serious art critiquing society's obsession with the internet, Bennani's videos of Beyoncé head-butting a basketball, and sculptures with jiggling butt cheeks, are really freaking funny.
But in the days that followed, a growing number of commentators played serious variations on the same theme: that the ideas foisted upon us by postmodern intellectuals have weakened the country's resolve.
These poems established ottava rima as the default stanza for epics on serious themes, a use that persisted in Italian until at least the 16th century, when Torquato Tasso used it for his embroidered tale of the Crusades, Gerusalemme liberata.
This is a pretty serious theme, worthy of a weighty treatise or a gritty, terrifying documentary that would be banned.
The psychological processes that are in progress during and after giving first aid are a serious theme.
Coward had another style, sentimental but theatrically effective, that he used for romantic, backward-glancing musicals and for plays constructed around patriotism or some other presumably serious theme.
