If you think classical music is po-faced and beyond a joke or two you are probably not the well-rounded person it's meant to address.

By being an accomplice, it can certainly withstand the wild jokes made at its expense by Pluck, a rollicking threesome of string-playing anarchists who believe M is for madness as well as for Mozart.

R is for raunchy and Ravel, as violinist Kit Massey, cellist Flora Allison and viola player Jon Regan get distracted during Bolero by unsuspecting members of the audience, who are then intimately regaled in hilarious fashion.

Music has a long tradition in comedy, much of it raising its laughs from ineptitude real or imagined and the weird realisation that anything played out of tune, too fast or too slow is funny.

Pluck's madcap humour is also based on the ideas that music is full of conflicts, which they personify, and that musicians are models of perfect accord, which these three in their certifiable stage personae are definitely not.

So that setting up a seating arrangement and manhandling music-stands (frail, bothersome things), playing passionately with a straight face and on different chairs, and deferring to each other's status become exercises in the surreal. It’s all about satirising musical decorum.

That Mr Massey has his trousers ripped off to reveal Union Jack underpants and Ms Allison ensnares Mr Regan's head in his Y-fronts suggest how much the music plays second fiddle, as it were, to the japes. But it rarely stops, even when performed lying down, leaning at a crazy angle or trouserless and in pain. Priceless comedy.