jocular

The movie seems to recoil from its own hammering dramatics, with Bryce Dessner’s score toggling uneasily between jocular blues and dour, overcompensating strings.

The company’s aesthetic mode is wayward, oblique, loose and jocular.

Setting aside Trump’s often jocular calls for Canada to become America’s “51st state,” none of his neocolonial claims, even if successfully accomplished, would make the slightest difference to this country’s security or prosperity.

But Trump’s arrival at changing the name to the Gulf of America retains none of the jocular tinge of Colbert’s sarcastic suggestion.

And its inclusion in a national inventory of cultural heritage currently being created looks set to reignite the jocular dispute.