(superl.) Queer, and fitted to provoke laughter; ludicrous from oddity; amusing and strange.
(n.) One whose practice it is to raise mirth by odd tricks; a jester; a buffoon; a merry-andrew.
(n.) Something exhibited to raise mirth or sport, as a puppet, a farce, and the like.
(v. i.) To jest; to play the buffoon.
(v. t.) To lead or influence by jest or trick; to banter or jest; to cajole.
(v. t.) To make a jest of; to set in a comical light.
Example Sentences:
(1) "It's like revisiting an old world," says Topley-Bird, who is droll and spacey where Tricky is hyperactively chatty.
(2) Obama's roommates were Paul Carpenter, a blond southern Californian who occasionally took his friends surfing (bodysurfing, in Barry's case), and Imad Husain, an intellectual Pakistani with a droll sense of humour who grew up in Karachi (though his parents now lived in Dubai) and finished his secondary education at Bedford School in the UK.
(3) She is by far the most popular …" Ms Harman was careful not to smile at this gallant jibe, but most of the shadow cabinet thought it very droll and smiled happily.
(4) Patterson says that she felt the most sympathy for her father, quietly droll, music-loving, a former Japanese POW.
(5) Tom was unsuited to the home-improvement periodicals for which he wrote in the late 70s, but in 1980 his droll and quizzical reviews began to appear in New Music News, an underground rock weekly launched by Felix Dennis to fill the vacuum left by the strike-bound NME and Melody Maker.
(6) She is the drama's underdog, but Lindqvist's droll, bullish performance elicits the most memorable moments of humour and pathos (as well as several uncomfortable moments in that bikini).
(7) His show was loose and disconnected, delivered in a droll, semi-stoned style that allowed him to ramble gently from one topic to the next.
(8) Here he reviews games with droll and super-fast wit, against a backdrop of animation.
(9) What happened to the droll and down-to-earth candidate who, without a qualm, is now embracing the Bonapartist style of Charles de Gaulle's presidency?
(11) "He was like, 'I've thrown parents in the pool before, don't make me throw you,'" says Tony, adopting a hangdog look and mimicking Murray in the lowest, most droll voice possible.
(12) Most of all, I will miss his style: his suave deportment; his droll sense of humour; his understatement and his physical energy; his articulacy; his charm; his grace.
(13) It's been significantly updated – the stand-out moment for me was when Beryl and Betty did a rap over Don't Stop Me Now (they do the words – "I'm a sex machine, ready to reload", which is droll for their dry delivery – but they also chat all the way through: "I think you were out of tune, there".
(14) In a presentation so droll that the people who came after him kicked off with "We're not going to be as enjoyable as that, I'm afraid", Haslam emphasised activity, more activity, sustainable activity – best of all, routine activity, that is built into your life and carries on regardless of the weather, or whether you've broken your arm.
(15) 1 Know thine enemy It is droll to observe nutritional advice at the public health level; governments and their agencies always approach obesity as though it were a problem of information or – in the popular phrasing – "awareness".
(16) Friday's launch was fun (cue Zuckerberg's droll status update: "Mark Zuckerberg listed a company on Nasdaq") but there's a tendency to see stock market flotations as the culmination of a company's existence.
(17) Every morning, he announces the location of each piece on his website and invites people to call a hotline for droll descriptions of the artwork's inspiration.
(18) Tristram is quite droll about the demands of the narrative, and describes the distance it puts between her and the disease as a kind of relief.
(19) His LinkedIn account is also testament to a droll sense of humour with a minimal CV.
(20) All very droll – but perhaps the self-proclaimed "cock of the walk" might like to think about letting the dust settle?
Jest
Definition:
(n.) A deed; an action; a gest.
(n.) A mask; a pageant; an interlude.
(n.) Something done or said in order to amuse; a joke; a witticism; a jocose or sportive remark or phrase. See Synonyms under Jest, v. i.
(v. i.) The object of laughter or sport; a laughingstock.
(v. i.) To take part in a merrymaking; -- especially, to act in a mask or interlude.
(v. i.) To make merriment by words or actions; to joke; to make light of anything.
Example Sentences:
(1) Dawn Powell: A Time to Be Born (1942) Joseph Heller: Catch-22 (1961) Kurt Vonnegut: Breakfast of Champions (1973) David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest (1996) The American comedy, generally speaking, is a scatological thing, or a repository of racial prejudice or gender stereotypes.
(2) Defining what constitutes merely a jest and what is of a "menacing character" has not been easy for the judges.
(3) In Hall’s farewell season of Shakespeare’s late romances in 1988, he led the company alongside Michael Bryant and Eileen Atkins , playing a clenched and possessed Leontes in The Winter’s Tale; an Italianate, jesting Iachimo in Cymbeline; and a gloriously drunken Trinculo in The Tempest (he played Prospero for Adrian Noble at the Theatre Royal, Bath, in 2012).
(4) The 2010 book was written by Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky, and is what it says on the tin: an account of a road trip with the author as he went across the US promoting his 1,100-page novel Infinite Jest, recalling the conversations the pair have and the fame that Foster Wallace is starting to experience.
(5) From Glasgow, Leeds , Bristol and Dublin , to New York , San Diego and Vancouver , to Perth , Melbourne and Sydney , groups of non-believers will be getting together to form their own monthly Sunday Assemblies, with the movement's founders – the standup comedians Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans – visiting the fledgling congregations in what they are calling, only partly in jest, a "global missionary tour".
(6) I did not say so, thank God, even in jest, otherwise our encounter could have been even worse than it was.
(7) "That was totally in jest," he added, saying he would "tone down my sense of humour until I become president, because America needs to get a sense of humour".
(8) Green's husband Wallace, best known for the novel Infinite Jest, committed suicide at home in 2008 , and was found by Green.
(9) "F alsehood flies," wrote Jonathan Swift 300 years ago, "and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect."
(10) ‘What is truth?” said jesting Pilate – in Bacon’s famous phrase.
(11) It was a jibe made in jest by a man who had much fondness for him.
(12) In comments that a source said were largely made in jest, Johnson – who is also the Conservative candidate for Uxbridge and South Ruislip – attacked the former prime minister over his speech in support of Labour’s current leader Ed Miliband.
(13) Although this article is presented in jest, I am not above anything that works to get contributions for my newsletter.
(14) I saw Brand's Messiah Complex show in London the other week, in which he – in jest, of course – compares himself to Che Guevara, Gandhi, Malcolm X and Christ.
(15) He likes winding people up, being controversial for the sake of it and more often than not what he says is in jest.
(16) In jest or in earnest, there is a rank hypocrisy here that sits uncomfortably with me.
(17) It was planned as the much-anticipated follow-up to Infinite Jest , the teeming 1,000-page bleakly comic masterpiece that had established Wallace, at 34, as the man most likely to redefine the scope and voice of the American novel.
(18) One 18th-century classicist is even said to have planned to write a scholarly edition of the best-known joke book of that period, Joe Miller's Jests , in order to show that every single joke in it was descended from the ancient Laughter Lover .
(19) Eurozone unlocks €10.3bn bailout loan for Greece Read more I jest of course.
(20) A number of edits, apparently made in jest, have been picked up by the automatic twitter bot Congress Edits , which monitors Wikipedia for changes to the site made by accounts with IP addresses coming from inside the US legislature.